In response to the increasing attention paid to environmental governance and leadership mobility, this study explores the interactions between leadership mobility and environmental governance performance. From the perspective of networks, this study aims to determine whether leadership mobility networks shape environmental governance outcomes. We argue that leadership transfer networks affect local water governance performance, which is particularly evident when leadership mobility occurs between cities with similar institutional environments. We collected managers’ career data and water governance performance from forty-one cities located in the Pan-Yangtze River Delta region in China from 2011 to 2015. Methodologically, we employ spatial temporal autoregressive models to test the hypotheses and confirm the effects of the leadership transfer network on the homogeneity of water governance performance across the region. Theoretically, this study advances the institutional collective action framework in regional water governance by providing supplementary mechanisms from the perspective of agent network diffusion.
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