Search

Copyright of Irrigation & Drainage is the property of Wiley-Blackwell and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

In recent years, China’s central government has focused strategically on motivating local governments to allocate more administrative resources to enhance performance in non-economic areas, such as environmental and cultural services. As a governance practice, the central government has initiated “evaluation and commendation” campaigns among local governments. The main governance objective of these local government campaigns is to solicit public engagement, including public participation, support, and actions. Based on a case study of the campaign to establish a National Civilised City, this paper presents the local government’s governance logic, operating mechanism, and governance performance in soliciting public engagement in “evaluation and commendation” activities. We find that in “evaluation and commendation” campaigns, characterised by short-term authority commendation incentives and shortage of governance resources, the local governments adopted the unusual governance mechanism of “administrative authority-driven public engagement”, using both flexible and mandatory strategies. The flexibility strategy leads to the active participation of citizens, but the mandatory strategy makes public engagement stay at the superficial level, characterised by surface-level cooperation and inner rejection, causing partial exclusion and separation between the government and the public, in turn exhibiting a “ratchet effect” in governance performance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In China, achieving sustainable development goals for PPP projects is an urgent issue. Project governance mechanisms are important to PPP project sustainability, but there are many risk factors in traditional project governance mechanisms. This research focuses on embedding risk governance mechanisms into the traditional project governance system with contract governance mechanisms and relationship governance mechanisms. The main purpose is to reveal the integration of PPP project governance mechanisms and its impact on governance performance and project sustainability, and to propose governance optimization strategies. First, by enriching the understanding of the governance mechanism, governance performance and project sustainability, and improving the measurement scale. Then, by constructing a structural equation model, collecting data through questionnaires, and exploring the effect of the project governance mechanism on project sustainability. (1) The results of direct effect testing show that contractual governance mechanisms, relational governance mechanisms and risk governance mechanisms are positively associated with governance performance, and governance performance is positively associated with project sustainability; (2) the results of mediating effect testing show that interaction of the three governance mechanisms has a positive effect on governance performance. The research results provide a new approach and perspectives for improving project governance mechanisms and achieving sustainable development in the practice of PPP projects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Social governance is an important aspect of national governance. Strengthening and innovating social governance is an important task to promote social construction, and the necessary policy support is an important means to achieve governance innovation. Based on the policy texts of 31 urban districts (including 22 provincial capitals, 4 municipalities directly under the Central Government and 5 capitals of autonomous regions), the innovation policy of social governance is divided into five dimensions: organizational mobilization policy, public service policy, social regulatory policy, community constructive policy and data informative policy. Using the fs-QCA method, the path of social governance innovation policy on governance performance is discussed. The study finds that the supply mode of two innovative policy combinations have a significant effect on the improvement of social governance performance: One is organizational mobilization policy, public service policy and community constructive policy, and the other is organizational mobilization policy, social regulatory policy and data informative policy., (Copyright © 2024 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.)

This study aims to answer the following research question: how do collaborative networks affect the performance of individual policy actors embedded in the network? We examine this question with a unique dataset on water governance in Dongguan city, China. We hypothesize that collaborative network affects the environmental performance of policy actors through a social influence mechanism, and that the performance of an ego actor will emulate that of alters in the network. We test this hypothesis by estimating network/spatial autoregressive models, and the results confirm the presence of a social influence effect. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Social Sciences in China is the property of Routledge and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

[Display omitted] • Introduced public value and cost structure model to evaluate the governance performance of marine eco-economic system. • Constructed governance result performance indicator system combining marine ecology, economy, and society indices. • Established governance process performance evaluation model involving participation, fairness, efficiency, and sustainability aspects. • Proposed transformed paths to improve governance mechanism of China's marine eco-economic system. Governance behavior and the proper allocation of governance rights, responsibilities, and benefits are critical for the coordinated and sustainable evolution of the marine eco-economic system. This study comprehensively evaluates the process and result performance of China's marine eco-economic system governance, based on panel data on 11 Chinese coastal provinces and cities from 2000 to 2016. Although the overall governance result has been improved by the marine economic and social subsystems, the marine ecological subsystem has declined and its development has stagnated the whole system. The process performance of the governance of China's marine eco-economic system has declined significantly because of gradually increasing endogenous transaction costs, general transaction costs, and social investment. The government of China controls the governance of the marine eco-economic system in the country. Enterprises, NGOs, the public, and others have limited participation because of a lack of incentives. Therefore, it is necessary to establish a more transparent governance game mechanism and a more reasonable distribution system of rights, responsibilities and interests, so as to form a new multi-subjects collaborative governance mechanism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Environmental pollution threatens public health and has become a social concern in recent years. Despite the conditions for public participation in environmental governance have improved considerably, the level of public engagement in government projects still falls short of expectations. Therefore, this article introduced two key variables, hoping to answer the following research question that how environmental concerns and governance performance affect public environmental participation. Through principal component analysis of the data from the "Survey of Chinese Urban Residents' Attitudes toward Environmental Protection", the findings of this article are as follows: First, public environmental concerns have no significant impact on their environmental engagement; second, the improvement of residents' confidence in the government performance of environmental management reduces their willingness to participate in official projects. The higher the confidence in the government's performance, the lower the level of public engagement is. Moreover, due to the consideration of self-interest or lack of environmental awareness, those who oppose waste incineration in waste terminal disposal tend to take a non-participatory role in waste sorting programs. Therefore, we suggest that the government have more diverse shareholders in environmental protection, so it should expand public participation through education, publicity, mobilization, and incentives.

Existing studies rarely examine the relationship between network structure and network performance. To fill this research gap, this article collects inter-local collaboration network data from 41 cities in the Yangtze River Delta region of China from 2009 to 2015. Based on the institutional collective action framework and social capital theory, we propose bridging and bonding hypotheses regarding the impact of network structures on governance performance. We employ social network analysis and panel data regression models to test the hypotheses. The results show that the coefficients for closeness centrality and clustering coefficient are statistically significant in this analysis, Wuxi played a central role in the collaboration network and the region had formed a close partner network, confirming the positive effect of bridging and bonding network social capital structures on network performance.