Stakes, stakeholders and urban governance: a theoretical framework for the Chinese city

ABSTRACT

A taxonomy of stakes and stakeholders in urban governance is presented in this paper. In addition to property interests, business interests, political interests and the state, special attention is paid to ordinary people’s general interests in the city. It depends on a person’s indigeneity, the degree of his being an indigenous person or insider to the city. General interest is usually not revealed because urban governance is more distant from the person than his daily work and life, but its revelation could be ignited in an explosive way by particular events on some occasions. This is called the flash preference problem, which has important implications to urban governance. Both social control and civil society can be regarded as possible solutions to the problem. Built on the taxonomy of stakes and stakeholders, a theoretical framework for urban governance in China includes growing property interests and business interests that have formed growth coalition with local government. Social control remains important but difficult because street office and residents’ committee are expected to strengthen social control while they are gradually being marginalized in neighborhood governance. The case of grid management not only demonstrates the dilemma of social control in China but also hints at the ultimate importance of democracy and civil society to urban governance.

KEYWORDS:

• Stakeholder
• urban governance
• flash preference
• civil society
• social control

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. According to Perez-Diaz (2014), there are four layers for the concept of civil society: a type of society (CS1), markets and associations (CS2), associations and social networks of any kind (CS3) and a subset of associations that convey a moral message connected with the value of civility (CS4).

2. Some early phenomena such as volunteers suggested possible emergence of civil society in China, but now that view appears to be too optimistic. Frolic’s (1997) attempt to twist the concept in order to adapt it to China’s reality is not without disagreement.

3. As one referee pointed out, shareholding companies may perform the task of political surveillance most effectively in wealthy urban villages by establishing the link between compliance of villagers and their dividend payment. This suggests that social control as a strategy for mitigating the flash preference problem might be least effective in poor villages where the problem is most acute. That could be regarded as another weakness of social control and also another reason for many explosive events in urban China.