The Road to Collaborative Governance in China

Collaborative governance has been emerging in China as a new way to adapt the government to unprecedented socioeconomic changes and challenges (Brown, Gong, and Jing 2012). Despite its worldwide popularity, adoption of collaborative governance in China undoubtedly sheds new light on its practical scope and theoretical implications, given China’s differences to earlier Western adopters. Like the apparent success of China’s transition to modernization since the late 1970s, which remains a hotbed of intellectual ventures, collaborative governance may also join this debate and offer a new perspective of understanding. In this book collaborative governance is defined as the sharing of power and discretion within and across the public, nonprofit, and private sectors for public purposes. Such a definition is not new given existing definitions. ¹

Countries around the world have increasingly relied on collaborative governance of public, nonprofit, and business sectors to deliver publicly funded services. In particular, networks as one type of collaborative arrangements have attracted much attention and become a popular mode of delivering health and human services (Kettl 2006; O’Leary, Gerard, and Bingham 2006; Agranoff 2007; Milward and Provan 2006; Goldsmith and Eggers 2004; Meier and O’Toole 2001). After 30 years of reform, alternative modes of public service provision—contracting out, grants, subsidies, and vouchers—have been widely adopted by China’s local governments. There is also an increasing interest in the formation of service delivery networks. The interest in networked governance has been spurred by the recognition of the complex and interdependent nature of the problems that the Chinese society deals with. For example, in an aging society, seniors often have multiple problems, such as poor health, mental illness, inadequate housing, and financial difficulties, that are difficult to be adequately addressed by a single service organization. To satisfy these complex needs, the policymakers and public managers at all levels of government are increasingly encouraging the formation of community-based networks that assume responsibility for providing publicly funded social services.

The delivery of social services to low-income families that may be struggling with a variety of challenges often requires a high level of coordination from service providers in different fields. In Hong Kong, in particular, a series of policies and centers aimed at fostering integrative approaches have been established in order to enhance collaboration among service providers at the community level. Some of these include Integrated Children and Youth Services, Integrated Home Care Services, Integrative Family Service Centres (IFSCs), and Integrated Community Centres for Mental Wellness. However, families still find themselves having difficulties in muddling through the system in order to get their problems solved, and service providers find themselves facing unrealistic demands and struggling between managing caseloads and coordinating with different community actors.

Policymaking in the field of climate protection has taken off in China. The aggravation of the pollution problems in many cities, increased coverage of climate issues by national and foreign media, and international cooperation mechanisms are urging the political leadership to address the issue of climate change. This chapter discusses enabling and disabling factors for collaboration and partnerships between state, market, and civil society actors in the field of climate protection.

Grassland degradation is a global challenge for the sustainable development of social-ecological systems (SESs) (CSC 1992; Sneath 1998). As part of the largest grassland in the world—the Eurasian Steppe—and the largest grassland region in China (Han et al. 2009; Li et al. 2012; Wu and Loucks 1992), the Inner Mongolia grassland, stretches over an area of approximately 0.88 million km ² and accounts for 73 percent of the total area of the Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region (IMAR). Grassland degradation, including some severe desertification, has spread rapidly over the past several decades (Akiyama and Kawamura 2007; Tong et al. 2004; Wu and Ci 2002). As much as 90 percent or more of the region’s grassland is estimated to be degraded to some degree (Enkhe 2009). Grassland degradation has resulted in a number of environmental and economic problems, including desertification, reduction in grassland productivity and biodiversity, and more importantly the frequent occurrence of large-scale dust storms (Wu and Loucks 1992; Liu and Wang 1997; Wu and Overton 2002). In this article, I use the terms “grassland degradation” and “desertification” more broadly to refer to a complex process that results from human activities and climate variations in arid, semiarid, and dry subhumid regions, the consequence of which include soil loss, erosion, loss of fertility, and species change and that, in turn, leads to the permanent loss of grassland productivity (Yang and Wu 2010, 2012). I also define the specific meanings of some terms (such as soil loss and erosion) when necessary.

The Chinese government has realized its inability to deliver the level of public services required by a rapidly expanding economy and a pluralizing society. Recently, microblogs and other social media along with successful e-commerce corporations with user-friendly and fast services have put a tremendous pressure on the government, challenging the prevailing hierarchical culture. China’s urbanites have become used to the convenience of online shopping, placing an order online in the morning and receiving the goods in the afternoon. Chinese central and local governments are acutely aware of the challenge of producing services that resemble this level of efficiency. They have adapted to this new environment by reengineering their work processes using digital information and communication technologies (ICT). This is all part of a larger trend, as e-government (the use of ICT in the public administration) has reshaped public agencies all over China during the last quarter of a century (Qiu and Hachigian 2005; Schl æ ger 2013). Design and construction of new ICT systems require expert knowledge, and hence government is enticed to include a broader set of actors in policy formulation and implementation.

In recent decades, challenges stemming from both human-made and natural disasters have become increasingly serious with the coming of a risk society. Traditionally, one function of the government, particularly local governments, has been to deal with disaster to secure citizens, making it inevitable for the government to operate based on bureaucratic norms and hierarchical command systems. It is important and critical for governments, facing the new and transformational challenges of disasters, to adopt alternatives to improve their capacity to cope with disasters in the new age.

Since the 1970s, the United Kingdom and the United States have carried out a bold privatization reform, which encouraged the private sector to participate in traditional areas of public goods provided by the government, thus triggering a worldwide wave of public—private partnership mode. On the one hand, the practice of private and public sectors cooperating to provide public goods eases the public financial pressure and helps the public sector to provide more goods. On the other hand, the provision of public goods by private sector encourages competition in the public infrastructure sector, thus the efficiency of public goods supply is enhanced. However, there are also some problems in the cooperation of private and public sectors, leading to the partnership mode changing from gloom to doom.

China’s phenomenal economic performance has largely been attributed to a competitive environment in which local governments compete with each other to attract business investment, resources, and talent. Recently attention has turned to the efforts that involve collaboration among multiple jurisdictions at the regional level. Local governments increasingly confront policy problems that span the boundaries of individual geographic jurisdictions. The need to work together has clustered them into several large regional collaborative zones to address positive and negative interjurisdictional externalities caused by rapid social and economic growth. China’s major regional collaborative zones include the Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei Metropolitan Region, the Yangtze River Delta, the Pan Pearl River Delta, and the Mid-China region (Ye 2009). Despite the fanfare of media coverage, how these regional collaborative zones work is still unknown. The purpose of this paper is to examine one type of regional collaborative mechanism—interlocal agreements (ILAs) from a network perspective. ILAs are formal and informal arrangements (joint planning, joint policy initiatives, joint programs, contracts, and others.) where one local government collaborates with another or in which multiple jurisdictions pool their resources for joint problem solving, better coordination, and diffusion of innovation. Scholars and researchers also recognize that multiple local governments that participated in multiple interlocal agreements became regional-level networked governance (Hu and Ma 2011; Thurmaier and Wood 2002). Regional networks of jurisdictions connected through multiple interlocal agreements are manifestations of regional collaborative governance.

Decision making is an important function of governments. The pursuit of effective decision making is as old as the history of governments. Yet, its process and dynamics continue evolving. Some earlier writings suggested that such terms as the “black box,” the “bounded rationality” (Simon 1947), or as Stone (1997) termed, the “paradox,” are often associated with decision making in general and government decisions in particular. A more recent interesting angle, with increasing prevalence, is the role of networks in policy decision making and management (O’Toole 1997: 45–52; Provan and Milward 2001: 414– 423; Romzek, LeRoux, and Blackmar 2012: 442–453; Agranoff and McGuire 2003). Networks are “structures of interdependence involving multiple organizations or parts thereof, where one unit is not merely the formal subordinate of the others in some larger hierarchical arrange” (O’Toole 1997: 45–52, p. 45). In that same article, O’Toole suggested several descriptive tasks that require sustained efforts, and one of the tasks is “exploring the array of networks in a broadly comparative perspective” (1997: 48). In Provan and Lemaire’s recent work (2012: 638–648), this task, however, is still identified as one of the obvious areas where research is very much needed.