Sub-theme
6. Innovation for Water Governance and Management
Topic
6-3. Adaptive water management
Body
This research aims to deconstruct China's new Tiao-Kaui authority relations in China's local government and understand the removal mechanism of institutional barriers in local government through the lens of the river chief system. River Chief System ("RCS") is China's recent water/river management approach, which assigns the major water management responsibility of the local rivers and water sections to the local head officials instead of distributing the responsibilities to different departments. Previously, there were several departments involved in China's water management. However, the responsibility and leadership are unclear, creating an administrative fragmentation and a vivid metaphor to describe this situation is that "Nine Dragons run the water" ("九龙治水"). Nine dragons stand for each water-related department which has its own management objectives. However, none take the leadership, leaving room for policy entrepreneurs due to resource competitions or a regulatory vacuum that 'pass the buck' when accounted for. But how RCS practically address the sectoral fragmentation and communication issues inside the government remains poorly understood. Also, current literature needs to include more about how the new river chief system was implemented at the local level and particularly align this new water management system with one of the administrative, institutional water/river management changes by RCS's introduction. China's bureaucratic structure can be described as a "Tiao-Kuai" relationship. "Kuai" refers to the horizontal jurisdictional government from the provincial to town level. "Tiao" refers to the vertical functional departments, which received guidance from the upper-level department and only provided professional consultation to the local government, but the local government controls the human resources and funding. Consequently, the local department gains dual-leadership from the horizontal jurisdictional government and the vertical upper-level department, leading to confusion in the management. China's River Chief System experienced significant development, and studies began to analyse the outcomes and impacts of the system, I decided to turn my focus back to the River Chief system's impact on the government and consider the key to RCS's success is behind the government practices. My research will answer how the introduction of RCS changes the "nine-dragons" and "Tiao-Kuai" relationship barriers in China's local water/river management. By doing this, this research investigates the implementation of river chief system at the local level of government in multiple scales --- from the county level down to the town-level government by adopting qualitative approaches, including semi-structured interviews and documentary analysis.