Types and Institutional Design Principles of Collaborative Governance in a Strong-Government Society: The Case Study of Desertification Control in Northern China

ABSTRACT

Although various actors participate in modern environmental and social governance, the types and mechanisms of the participation and collaboration of these actors have received little scholarly attention, especially in a society influenced by strict government policies. Based on a case study of 12 field sites and a systematic review of an additional 16 sites reported in the literature on desertification control in northern China, this study identified four types of collaboration and determined Type I (Strong Government with Strong Nongovernmental Participants) to be the best for desertification control performance, Type IV (Weak Government with Weak Nongovernmental Participants) to be the worst, and Type II (Strong Government with Weak Nongovernmental Participants) and Type III (Weak Government with Strong Nongovernmental Participants) to be tied for second place. This study also proposed eight principles for effective collaboration that addressed (1) the effective participation of multiple actors with enough support resources; (2) open and democratic forums for multiple-actor collaboration; (3) targeted, organized, systematic, and persistent collaborative activities; (4) effective mechanisms for discussion, communication, and shared learning; (5) effective trust-building mechanisms; (6) effective mechanisms of realization and increase of potential gains and fair distribution of benefits; (7) effective conflict resolution mechanisms; and (8) experiment-extension governance methods.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I would like to thank Professor Zhiyong Lan for comments and suggestions on an earlier version of the paper. I would also like to thank my graduated students and research assistants Wensheng Chen, Teng Zhang, Pengyun Shen, Qing Xia, Yun Zhang, Chen Li, Yuzeng He, Mulan Hao, Xiaojing Ni, Yao Xu, and Gereltogtokh Ganbat for their help with fieldwork and data collection. I also want to thank Lu Tang for her hard work on collecting data for meta-analysis cases and early analyses in Chinese. My special thanks go to the two anonymous reviewers and the editor-in-chief, whose suggestions and comments have significantly improved the article.

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Lihua Yang

Lihua Yang ([email protected]) is Professor of the School of Public Administration and Director of the Workshop for Environmental Governance and Sustainability Science, Beihang University, Beijing, China. He graduated from Peking University and Indiana University (Bloomington) with two bachelor's degrees (Law and Economics) and two master's degrees (Management and Political Science). He got his doctorate in the School of Public Affairs, Arizona State University, in May 2009. His research interests include collaborative governance, environmental management and policy, and institutional economics.