Embracing market and civic actor participation in public rental housing governance: new insights about power distribution

Abstract

In recent decades, government intervention in welfare states has witnessed a shift from ‘government’ to ‘governance’: policy making shifted from hierarchical government steering to mixed forms involving government, market and civic actors. Such terminology has also entered Chinese policy language on public rental housing (PRH) provision. To unravel the perceived power distribution in the relationships between the involved actors, this article draws from in-depth interviews in two Chinese cities: Chongqing and Fuzhou. The article thereby contributes new insights to the perceived power relations in Chinese PRH provision on the ground. It also develops an analytical framework based on Billis by complementing it with Social Network Analysis to measure the power relations. Such a framework will allow the comparison of different governance systems across time and different jurisdictions within and beyond China. This study shows the structures and mechanisms for non-governmental actors to play a role, which they do not have in the ‘government’ period, in the governance of PRH.

Keywords:

• Public rental housing
• governance
• government
• power distribution
• social network analysis

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank the respondents to the questionnaire survey and the interviewees who talked with us face-to-face or over the phone. Furthermore, we would like to thank those who commented on the earlier version of this paper presented at ENHR2017 in Tirana. Specifically, we would like to show our deepest gratitude to the anonymous referees and the Editors for their useful comments and suggestions, which helped us to enhance the manuscript. Moreover, we are grateful for the financial support from the China Scholarship Council.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 The original element proposed by Billis (2010) was governance of the organisation. To prevent confusion with governance on a societal level, such as PRH governance, this paper uses the term ‘management’ instead.

2 Investment organisations are also known as Local Government Financing Platforms, which are usually state-owned enterprises that develop, finance and implement public infrastructure projects (including PRH) (Jin and Rial, 2016).

3 The RC is a basic unit of urban governance in China and is originally defined as ‘mass organisation of self-management at the grassroots level’ in the Constitution of the People’s Republic of China (1993).

4 No consensus has been reached yet about whether it is scientifically valid to use non-binary data for network analysis (Wei et al., 2011). According to some classic works in the SNA field, for instance, Freeman (1978), Martınez et al. (2003) and Opsahl et al. (2010), the aforementioned measures are only designed for binary networks. Hence, we applied binary data here. The five-point scale data is helpful to provide supplementary information to the examination of the interrelationships and to draw our conclusion.

5 For instance, having two principles from the state sector and three from the community sector makes an actor a Community/State actor, indicating that the hybrid actor is embedded in community, but with some state actors’ characteristics.

6 Out-degree of the node A in a directed network means the number of nodes originated at A. Correspondingly, in-degree means the number of nodes destined to node A.

7 The competent authority is the government department which is designated by the municipal government to administer all matters related to the PRH provision.

8 Although Chongqing government do not own the land (investment organisations do) and only finance 20% of the investment (10% from central government and 70% from investment organisations), the government is still considered to steer the allocation of key resources. This is due to the investment organisations are established by the local government and their work associated with PRH need to be approved by the government. The investment organisation in Chongqing is like the nationalised industries in many countries owned by government but operating in the market (Billis, 2010).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Juan Yan

Juan Yan is a PhD candidate from Delft University of Technology. Her research interests are in housing governance, public housing provision, social network analysis, and governance performance measurement.

Marietta Haffner

Marietta Haffner is an Assistant Professor at the Faculty of Architecture and the Built Environment at Delft University of Technology. Marietta's interests include financial and economic aspects of housing, including topics as housing affordability, housing capability, housing tenure, housing policy and equity issues.

Marja Elsinga

Marja Elsinga is professor of Housing Institutions & Governance at the Faculty of Architecture and the Built Environment at Delft University of Technology. Her research focusses on how to make adequate housing work in different contexts and how countries can learn from each other.