Public management in China: reform, innovation and governance

Background

In an era of economic globalization and informatization, public institutions worldwide are required to provide higher quality of public service in response to demands from citizens. However, different authorities have faced unprecedented challenges in fulfilling these expectations, contributing to growing public discontent and suspicion toward the public sector. Practitioners and public management scholars increasingly realize that it is necessary to develop innovative approaches and governing capacity, to cope with the tough challenges under the growing complexity of economic and political governance. Accordingly, reform and innovation programs and innovative solutions have become pervasive worldwide (Wu, Ma, and Yang 2013). Such reforms and innovation are expected to achieve better governance.

Over the past several decades, scholars have devoted many efforts to discussing academic issues related to innovations and reforms in the public sector. First, some scholars use government innovation awards and the text analysis method to investigate characteristics, initiators, and conditions leading to innovations, obstacles to innovations, innovating strategies, innovation typology, and the consequences of innovation (Borins 2000; Borins 2001; Wu, Ma, and Yang 2013; Chen, Walker, and Sawhney 2019). Second, research has applied event history analysis to identify drivers of innovation diffusion (Berry and Berry 1990; Mintrom and Vergari 1998; Karch 2006; Zhu and Zhang 2016; Yi and Chen 2019), and applied survey data to examine antecedents of innovations (Walker 2006; Walker 2007; Walker, Avellaneda, and Berry 2011). Third, some scholars have also begun to focus on some new topics, such as the sustainability (Van Acker and Bouckaert 2018) and persistence of innovations (Borins 2014). Though we have accumulated some knowledge about innovations, most current studies in this field are conducted in the western context, and innovation research in developing countries, particularly in China, is needed to deepen our understanding.

Reform and innovation, emerging forty years ago, are mainly rooted in China’s institutional arrangements for multilevel systems (Wu, Ma, and Yang 2013). Since the adoption and implementation of the Reform and Opening-up Strategy in 1978, China has undergone a dramatic institutional transformation with the changes in central-local relationships, e.g., a mixture of political centralization and fiscal decentralization (Xu 2011). With respect to political centralization, the central state initiated nationwide policies, and controls the local implementation through cadre personnel systems (Liang and Langbein 2015). At the same time, fiscal decentralization granted certain degrees of autonomy to local governments, which enabled them to develop specific policy goals and instruments of their own characteristics when following the instructions of central state (Heilmann 2008; Zhu and Zhao 2018). This central-local interaction is unique and makes the process of reform and innovation distinct from the situations in other institutional contexts.

Given these innovation characteristics, the China Institute for Urban Governance and School of International and Public Affairs at Shanghai Jiao Tong University held the IPMN 2017 Conference with the theme of “Reform, Innovation and Governance: Improving Performance and Accountability in Changing Times”. Specifically, the conference set three sub-themes, including “How to Implement Reform Strategies of State and Local Authorities,” “How to Promote Innovation in Public Service Organizations”, and “How to Improve Governance through Reform and Innovation.” (Parts of this call for papers are reproduced above.) 52 papers were selected for presentation by authors from the United States, United Kingdom, Italy, France, Austria, Switzerland, Spain, Norway, Egypt, Russia, Mainland China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Pakistan, Korea and Singapore. Of these conference papers four articles are included in this symposium.

Articles in the symposium

The symposium consists four articles covering various policy domains and each of them tackles an important research question around the main themes mentioned above.

Given that China is a unitary state, performance targets imposed by upper authorities are an important vertical results-oriented influence on local governments’ policy adoption. The impact of this is little studied. To narrow this research gap, in “Performance Targets, Path Dependence, and Policy Adoption: Evidence from the Adoption of Pollutant Emission Control Policies in Chinese Provinces,” Zhang and Wu (2020) ran spatial autoregression models to investigate empirically the effects of mandatory performance targets on environmental policy adoption processes in China, using the adoption of atmospheric pollutant emission standards by Chinese provinces from 2000 to 2015. They found that top-down performance targets can actually drive the adoption of atmospheric pollutant emission standards in Chinese provinces. Furthermore, the influence of vertical environmental performance targets on the adoption of local atmospheric pollutant emission standards is stronger in Chinese provinces that have adopted more similar standards in the previous period. The authors conclude that top-down performance management shapes the policy adoption processes and policy adoption of Chinese provinces under vertical result-oriented performance target pressure is path-dependent.

In “Fiscal Slack or Environmental Pressures: Which Matters More for Technological Innovation Assimilation? A Configurational Approach,” Fan, Meng, and Wei (2020) developed a configurational perspective combining fiscal slack and environmental pressures. They employed fs-QCA in the context of Chinese provincial governments’ online public service provision. Fiscal slack has long been theoretically regarded as an important antecedent to technological innovation. However, recent empirical studies did not empirically substantiate this relationship. Considering the inconsistencies between theoretical exploration and empirical test, the authors find that fiscal slack is likely irrelevant to a high degree of technological innovation assimilation, but rather the demanding environments of multiple environmental pressures matter. Also, relative fiscal scarcity may be somewhat relevant to a low degree of technological innovation assimilation only when combined with a more relaxed environment.

Zhang and Zhu (2020) article, “Career Cohorts and Inter-Jurisdictional Innovation Diffusion: An Empirical Exploration in China” presents how career cohorts among subnational leaders, who are classified based on political ranks and ages, shape inter-jurisdictional innovation diffusion in China. Why does a local government tend to acquire a policy from one local government rather than from another? Previous studies mainly focused on organizational-level mechanisms to explain horizontal information exchange and innovation diffusion, ignoring the actor-level factors. Zhang and Zhu’s work tries to fill this research gap by focusing attention on an official cohort which is regulated by a career mobility system. Their findings reveal that, those from the same cohort tend to share relatively homogeneous policy information and compete with one another intensely due to overlapping future career opportunities, thereby creating a unique pattern of policy interdependence across multiple jurisdictions. Another finding is that after controlling for multiple previously identified diffusion mechanisms and internal determinants, the cohort effect among provincial party chiefs significantly increases the likelihood of innovation diffusion in China.

Finally in “Same Bed, Different Dreams? Structural Factors and Leadership Characteristics of Central Government Agency Reform in China (*this article has already been published in another issue due to communication issues, but it is also from the IPMN 2017 Conference and guest edited by Professor Richard Walker and Professor Jiannan Wu),” Liang Ma and Tom Christensen (Ma and Christensen 2019) focus on structural features and the post-merger process, paying special attention to structural and cultural integration, finding that the National Health and Family Planning Commission (NHFPC) is considered to have been more successful in merging agencies and integrating functions than the State Administration for Press, Publications, Radio, Film and Television (SAPPRFT). They also found that using physical arrangements and leadership features as explanatory variables generated helpful theoretical and policy implications for organizational architecture and public sector reforms. For example, by modifying boundaries, blending subunits, and generating consensus, leadership plays a critical role in post-merger integration, which is not unique to China and can be extended to other institutional contexts.

Concluding thoughts and future prospects

This symposium attempts to advance research on reforms and innovations in China. Yet there is more to be done to fully understand reform, innovation, and public governance in China (Su, Walker, and Xue 2013). On the one hand, China’s reforms and innovations occurred in every corner of society,and we still need more cases in different policy domains to understand China’s reform initiatives. On the other hand, in addition to features and drivers of reform or innovations, it is also necessary to investigate impacts of reform or innovation initiatives in China and the conditions that make these reforms or innovations effective or not. Only in this way can China’s lessons and experience contribute to the worldwide practice of good governance.

Particularly with unexpected outbreak of COVID-19, it is the right time for all the people around the world to refocus and reflect on public management while emphasizing on reform, innovation and governance. When facing the pandemic, we can see how different stakeholder and feeling-holder in different countries have played their roles in different ways when risks and uncertainties that the human beings are facing are continuously increasing. It requires all scholars and practitioners in the public management community to face this new challenge, to shoulder new responsibilities, and to work together to ensure a better future for current and future generations.

Acknowledgments

The IPMN 2017 Conference was made possible by the funding from the China Institute for Urban Governance and School of International and Public Affairs of Shanghai Jiao Tong University, as well as the NSFC project titled “Air Pollution, Policy Innovation, and Performance Improvement: An Empirical Study from Mainland China” by Jiannan Wu and Richard Walker. In the conference held at the Shanghai Jiao Tong University (SJTU) in 2017, the following scholars presented their research and contributed towards a stimulating debate, which has assisted in advancing knowledge of public management in China: Hamza Ates, Stephen Barber, Carmine Bianchi, Hon Chan, Bin Chen, Peixian Chen, Zitao Chen, Kuo-Tai Cheng, Tom Christensen, Yixin Dai, Siying Ding, Ali Asker Gündüz, Lei Guo, Yue Guo, Ayesha Hanif, Ariful Haque, Yanru Huang, Sidra Irfan, Junxue Jia, Yijia Jing, Steven Kelman, Daejoon Kim, Kilkon Ko, Alexander Kotchegura, Per Laegreid, M. Jin Lee, Yeyoung Lee, Sihan Li, Yanwei Li, Xintao Li, Bangcheng Liu, Jia Liu, Yongzheng Liu, Richard Lui, Liang Ma, Roula Masou, Fanrong Meng, Alex Murdock, Zahra Paul, Moritz Piatti, Vicente Pina, Zhao Qin, Kuno Schedler, Junxiu Sun, Tian Tang, Lourdes Torres, Tai Anh Vu, Richard M. Walker, Feng Wang, Jie Wang, Yin Wang, Huan Wang, Jing Wen, Clay G. Wescott, Jiannan Wu, Hanyu Xiao, Mengmeng Xu, Jingyuan Xu, Bo Yan, Zhenjie Yang, Chao Ye, Haitao Yin, Xueyong Zhan, Pan Zhang, Ruiliang Zhang, Chenlin Zhao, Rui Zhao, Lingyi Zhou, Xufeng Zhu, and my colleagues from SJTU. Particularly, Clay Wescott, as President of IPMN, and my colleagues Bangcheng Liu, Bo Yan, Fanrong Meng, Liang Ma, Jing Xiong, and Pan Zhang who worked together on the call for papers and the conference program. We should also give our special thanks to the conference academic committee members who have made the conference attract more submissions. Finally, this introduction also gets support and suggestions from Boming Xie, Ziteng Fan, Pan Zhang. Thank you!

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Jiannan Wu

Jiannan Wu is distinguished professor at School of International and Public Affairs, Shanghai Jiao Tong University. He currently serves as Executive Vice Director of China Institute for Urban Governance and Director of Center for Reform, Innovation and Governance. He also serves as General Secretary of Asian Public Administration Association.

Richard M. Walker

Richard M. Walker holds the Chan Hon Pun Professor in Behavioural and Policy Sciences and is a Chair Professor in the Department of Public Policy, City University of Hong Kong. He is Director of the Laboratory for Public Management and Policy. He currently serves as the Dean of the College of Liberal Arts and Social Sciences and President of the Public Management Research Association.