Some Enlightenment on Stakeholder Engagement: An Inquiry into Sustainable Development Disparity and Its Drivers in CHINA'S Two Leading Economic Zones

Not only accumulating more social outcomes and avoiding worse environmental situations, but also mitigating sustainable development disparity, is an inevitable challenge for transitioning to sustainable development. Measurement of sustainable development disparity and identification of its drivers will be effective to enlighten the stakeholder engagement of sustainable development. In this paper, the inter-provincial sustainable development disparity of China's two leading economic zones during the period 2001–2012 is presented from absolute and relative perspectives after evaluating the comprehensive sustainable development performance, and several convergence models are constructed to test whether the disparity tends to diverge. Furthermore, the constructed decomposition model of sustainable development disparity is applied to investigate the contributions between the BHR (Bohai Rim) and YRD (Yangtze River Delta), intra-BHR and intra-YRD, and then the drivers are revealed by multiple stepwise regression analyses. Results highlight the following: there is an evident inter-provincial sustainable development disparity, and the conditional β-convergence becomes faster as more structural factors are added gradually; the sustainable development disparity of BHR is higher than that of YRD in the period, and the inter-BHR disparity makes great contributions (from 85.19% to 85.53%); such drivers can indicate an explicit direction for narrowing disparity (for instance, when one of the important indicators increases by 1%, the disparity of the economic subsystem and the whole sustainability system will reduce by 0.297% and 0.087%). Future policies and regulations to address sustainable development disparity are critical so as to promote sustainability management under the ‘equity and efficiency’ principle. Copyright © 2017 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and ERP Environment