Local Governance Innovation in China : Experimentation, Diffusion, and Defiance

This book analyses how decentralized policy making and conflicting rules and incentives have encouraged local level policy experimentation across China’s cities and villages. Most often out of necessity or expediency in the face of governance challenges associated with rapid economic reform and slow political reform, this pattern has remained relatively constant since 1978. The contributors to this book examine how local-level institutions solve governance challenges, such as rural development, enterprise reform, providing social services, and grappling with a lack of transparency.

Despite a centralized formal structure, Chinese politics and policy-making have long been marked by substantial degrees of regional and local variation and experimentation. These trends have, if anything, intensified as China’s reform matures. Though often remarked upon, the politicsof policy formation, diffusion, and implementation at the subnational level have not previously been comprehensively described, let alone satisfactorily explained.

Based on extensive fieldwork, this book explores how policies diffuse across China today, the mechanisms through which local governments actually arrive at specific solutions, and the implications for China’s political development and stability in the years ahead. The chapters examine how local-level institutions solve governance challenges, such as rural development, enterprise reform, and social service provision. Focusing on diverse policy areas that include land use, state-owned enterprise reform, and house churches, the contributors all address the same overarching question: how do local policymakers innovate in each issue area to address a governance challenges and how, if at all, do these innovations diffuse into national politics.

As a study of local governance in China today, this book will appeal to both students and scholars of Chinese politics, comparative politics, governance and development studies, and also to policy-makers interested in authoritarianism and governance.