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To be effective, a regulatory regime for sustainable development must demonstrate to the regulated entities its resolve to attain regulatory goals while avoiding an arbitrary exercise of authority. Yet many developing countries lack the robust political-administrative institutions to construct and maintain such regimes. The environmental reform in Guangdong, China, shows how, with underdeveloped formal political-administrative institutions, the regulatory regime must demonstrate commitment acts, including transparent enforcement, compliance benchmarking, expectation pacing, and third-party enforcement. These acts help, over time, to maintain enterprises' perceptions of the regulatory regime's resolve, clarity, and reasonableness. By analyzing primary data from extensive fieldwork and survey observations conducted at two separate times, we show that enterprises are more likely to adopt environmental management measures if they perceive higher regulatory resolve, clarity, and reasonableness. Their assurance needs vary at different stages of regime development. Establishing clear expectations matters at an earlier stage when regulatory goals are new and expectations relatively lax. Yet, as expectations become more stringent, maintaining reasonableness becomes essential. In both stages, a perception of resoluteness in enforcement matters. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Policy Studies Journal 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.)

Performance‐oriented management has been proposed as a remedy to policy implementation failure, which is a persuasive woe globally. Recent scholarship on policy implementation through performance measurement and management focuses on client‐oriented services, with less attention paid to the inadequacy of performance indicators in covering all desirable policy goals and in incentivizing all government officials in a non‐client‐oriented service arena, for instance, environmental governance. Based on station‐level water quality data before and after the implementation of China's Huai River Basin Water Quality Accountability Program, we utilize a difference‐in‐differences (DiD) method to investigate how various water quality indicators in the Huai River Basin (HRB) have responded to the new personnel‐based performance measurement system which aimed to enhance environmental policy implementation at the local level. We show that the program succeeded in motivating government officials to meet targeted indicators, but it also led to the worsening of non‐targeted ones. We also find that the impact of this personnel‐based program was sensitive to personal and contextual factors: it affected younger local officials more strongly than those who were older and saw a more limited prospect for promotion. These findings provide evidence for the effectiveness of the personnel‐based measurement system, which may be considered by other countries, particularly those with authoritarian regimes and significant policy implementation failures. At the same time, complementary measures such as institutional arrangements that discover and report omitted important performance aspects, should be considered to safeguard the possible pitfalls of the system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Most studies in collaborative governance examine system-level or agency-level drivers of the horizontal dimension of collaboration, that is, the specific forms of collaboration among an existing set of actors. Few have examined the vertical dimension, that is, what actors are involved and the scope of collaboration. This study examines the latter issue by studying the implementation of the California Sustainable Groundwater Management Act (SGMA), passed in 2014, mandating collaboration among local agencies. We theorize that when their core mission and key constituencies' interests are at stake under a mandate, agencies focus on protecting organizational autonomy and bureaucratic turf in determining the scope of the collaborative arrangement, rendering other usual collaboration drivers less relevant. With data derived from administrative records and a statewide survey of local groundwater managers, we test this argument using several analytical methods, including probit regression, two-step estimation of an ordered probit selection model, and a linear probability model. The analyses consistently show that agencies are more likely to commit to regionally integrated collaboration that matches the scale of a groundwater basin if (1) their mission addresses a broader issue focus (lower issue specificity), (2) their core stakeholder groups have less concentrated interests, and (3) the organizational culture is less rigid and risk averse. In contrast, other well-known horizontal collaboration drivers do not matter. By unpacking the agency-specific sources of turf and reputation protection, this study contributes to an understanding of collaboration risk management. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

ENGOs are an essential part of the institutional fabric of environmental governance. A key issue is how they participate in environmental policymaking through different strategies, including legal, administrative, and media advocacy. Using original data on Chinese ENGOs, this article examines how ENGOs' dependency on government funding and donations, and their perceptions of the broader political environment, affect their engagement in policy advocacy. Our empirical analysis shows that a) government funding increases ENGOs' engagement in all advocacy strategies, whereas donations reduce administrative advocacy; and b) the perceived political environment affects ENGO advocacy strategies by changing the dynamics between funders and ENGOs, triggering caution against political risks and increasing ENGOs' dependence on donors. This study highlights how a restrictive political environment shapes ENGOs' relations with the state and their philanthropic donors in environmental governance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A critical issue in public accountability is how to reduce chances for dysfunctionalities. This research addresses it by examining both theoretically and empirically how quality reporting may reduce accountability deficit and overload in a multi-principal setting. Analyses of data from the Program Assessment Rating Tool (PART) during the Bush Administration show that programs exhibiting higher reporting quality attained higher performance ratings, which, in turn, led to larger budgetary recommendations. Higher reporting quality also helped reduce the differences between presidential and congressional budgetary decisions. This article contributes to developing a contingent, process-based theory of public accountability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Public Administration 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.)