Neither Centre nor Local: Community-Driven Experimentalist Governance in China

Abstract

Based on findings from three years of site-intensive fieldwork at the local level, this article presents evidence to suggest that binary governance frameworks like centre-local relations are insufficient to understand certain local regulatory outcomes in contemporary China. I seek to specify a distinct type of local governance that has been emerging in recent years, which blurs existing binary concepts. It can be distinguished along two main dimensions: ostensible structure and modalities of governance. Two cases are analysed to illustrate the ways in which it impacts local regulatory outcomes. The analyses point to the need for expanding our portfolio of approaches to understanding local governance in contemporary China.Keywords: local governance; community-driven experimentalist governance; environment; energy; centre-local relations Regulation and policy outcomes in local China, especially in environment and energy, are often explained by binary concepts, such as centre-local, or principal-agent, relations. This article illustrates that such binary frameworks overlook important governance changes that have been manifesting in contemporary China, especially in localities away from major economic or political centres. Specifically, I detail a kind of post-hierarchical governance that makes distinctions like centre, local or centre-local less useful or germane. It is distinct in two broad dimensions. First, the principal-agent relations within the political hierarchy are giving way to professional community-building between actors across multiple levels and sectors. In particular, certain local state actors are increasingly crossing the boundaries of both the locality and the political hierarchy to form professional communities 1 with actors without. Second, beyond

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What Motivates Local Sustainability Policy Action in China? The Case of Low-Carbon City Pilot Program

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The selective centralization in decentralization: China’s environmental vertical management reform with a case study in Hebei province

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