Hong Kong’s first-ever five-year plan for economic and social development (2026-2030) is out for public consultation. The section on the “development of regional cooperation” stands out for its call to “advance the development of key cooperation platforms, and strengthen collaboration with other areas, provinces, municipalities and autonomous regions in the mainland”.
Similarly, Shenzhen has set out an agenda for the high-level development of major cooperation platforms in its 15th five-year plan to deepen practical cooperation with Hong Kong and Macau. Nationally, China’s 15th five-year plan also underscores the advancing of the Greater Bay Area by enhancing the alignment of rules, standards and institutional frameworks.
Cooperation in the Greater Bay Area remains constrained by different legal, regulatory and governance systems under the “one country, two systems” framework. Even when Hong Kong’s and Shenzhen’s policy documents point in the same direction, businesses, researchers and public agencies still face long-standing friction in areas such as cross-border data sharing, funding and regulatory compliance.
If Hong Kong is to, as its proposed five-year plan says, “make good use of key cooperation platforms”, those platforms must go beyond technical aspects and offer a stable institutional framework that can bridge rules, set common standards and provide governance structures capable of handling disputes, aligning expectations and sustaining cooperation.
The San Francisco Bay Area experience offers a useful point of reference. Its development was never a straightforward story of decentralised growth. When Silicon Valley emerged as a hi-tech powerhouse in the 1950s and 1960s, the technology boom driven by universities, private companies and research institutions brought an influx of talent and capital as well as challenges in housing, traffic congestion and environmental degradation.
Bay Area governments came to recognise that these were shared challenges spanning multiple jurisdictions, legal mandates and regulatory regimes. Addressing them required coordinated approaches rather than piecemeal responses. The Association of Bay Area Governments (ABAG) was founded to provide a solution in 1961. Nine counties and more than a hundred cities and towns have joined hands to form a policy platform, made possible by joint powers agreements.
San Jose, the commercial hub of Silicon Valley, California, and its network of freeways. The San Francisco Bay Area has long been understood as a region made up of the nine counties that touch the bay. Photo: Getty Images
