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As urban agglomerations have become the main spatial organization form in China, it is of great significance to carry out environmental cooperative governance based on urban agglomerations. Research on the interaction of environmental regulation enforcement among cities can provide a new explanation for the competition and cooperation in terms of pollution control in urban agglomerations. This article selected three types of environmental regulation policy tools: market-incentive, command-and-control, and their combinations, and analyzed the interaction pattern of environmental regulations based on the theoretical mechanism derivation and the two zone spatial Durbin model by using the panel data of 103 cities in China. Then, the SLX model was used to explore the impact of the interaction of environmental regulations on the cooperative governance of pollution in five urban agglomerations. The results showed that the market-incentive environmental regulation was not fully implemented, which meant that some cities adopted a 'race to the bottom' strategy in response of the competition with their neighbors. After combining market-incentive environmental regulation with command and-control environmental regulation, the pattern of environmental regulation interaction between cities changed from ' race to the bottom' to 'race to the top'. This interactive characteristic was particularly significant in the Yangtze River Delta and the Chengdu Chongqing urban agglomerations. However, the 'racing to the top' characteristic of these two urban agglomerations had different effects on the intercity environmental cooperation: there was a synergy effect caused by strong spillover effect of environmental regulation implementation in the Yangtze River Delta urban agglomeration rather than in the Chengdu-Chongqing urban agglomeration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]