To intervene or not: strategic choices of the central government in China’s sub-national hydropolitics

ABSTRACT

China’s decentralized system explains the reasons for its sub-national inter-jurisdictional collaboration and conflicts in watershed issues. However, few studies have discussed the central government’s role as a strategic actor in sub-national hydropolitics. Existing research ignores the reason for central government intervention in inter-jurisdictional collaboration. This study discusses why central government intervention in sub-national inter-jurisdictional collaboration is a strategic choice performed after repeated trade-offs. The significant impediments to collaboration among jurisdictions and the low propensity for self-enforcement are core conditions for intervention. Central government intervention does not occur when inter-jurisdictional collaboration is easy to achieve, even if direct intervention conditions exist.

KEYWORDS:

• Central government intervention
• China
• institutional collective action
• qualitative comparative analysis
• sub-national hydropolitics
• watershed environmental agreements

Acknowledgements

Thanks to Professor Ling Jiang, Assistant Professor Jian Zhang and Assistant Professor Bin Hu for their feedback and suggestions on previous drafts.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Supplementary material

Supplementary data for this article can be accessed at https://doi.org/10.1080/02508060.2021.1943293

Notes

1. In the literature on institutional collective action, the collaboration risk reflects the impediments to collaboration. The term ‘impediments to collaboration’ is used in this paper instead of ‘collaboration risk’ to avoid misleading.

2. Although inter-jurisdictional agreements consist of informal and formal agreements, the number of publicly reported informal agreements is minimal. Informal agreements are also difficult to judge by uniform criteria. Moreover, it is challenging to have strategic central government intervention in informal agreements. For this reason, this study refers to inter-jurisdictional agreements only as formal agreements.

3. For detailed information, see the following news and scholarship (in Chinese): Han River’s Hidden Concerns: Inter-jurisdictional Water Resources Protection Dilemma (https://m.yicai.com/news/1098136.html); Dong River Watershed Eco-compensation Dilemma (http://www.p5w.net/news/gncj/201107/t3720873.htm); Guangdong and Guangxi jointly govern the Jiuzhou River (http://epaper.cenews.com.cn/html/2014-08/15/content_15446.htm); Chinese People’s Congress Delegates Call for Enhanced Environmental Protection of Chishui River (http://www.chinanews.com/sh/2014/03-06/5920757.shtml); and Chen et al. (2017).

4. Although negotiations for agreements may continue for many years, we could not determine the start of negotiations for each agreement through public channels. The negotiation process for some agreements may be intermittent. Therefore, we referred to Yi et al. (2018) and selected data from one year before the agreement was signed for analysis.

5. Tibet is a critical geopolitical region in China. In the 1980s, the emergence of a policy of co-optation allowed local ethnic minority cadres to rise to high ranks in provincial leadership bodies (Bulman & Jaros, 2020). However, Tibetans have not served in the Politburo since 1949. To judge in a manner consistent with other regions would seriously undermine the political status of Tibet. Therefore, we used only data on the Han Chinese in Tibet’s top leadership to measure its political status.

6. Guangdong province had nine top officials between 1990 and 2015. However, one of them served as governor and secretary before joining the Politburo, which occurred after completing their tenure in the province. Therefore, this category needs to be calculated based on the actual number of officials, rather than the number of offices held.

7. Including (1) a Member of the Politburo during their term of office and (2) a Member of the Politburo after their term in the province.

8. Baidu Encyclopaedia is China’s Wikipedia. It contains over 17 million Chinese words and phrases, including biographical information on most Chinese government officials.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the National Social Science Fund of China [grant number 16BZZ077].