Association for Public Policy Analysis & Management

The issues of fragmentation pose significant challenges to environmental governance at the local level. Fragmentation in government authorities could be horizontal, vertical and functional (Feiock and Scholz, 2010). Functional fragmentation refers to fragmentation of authorities among policy areas, services, and departments and agencies within a single government, resulting in inefficiencies and ineffectiveness in delivering public services. Recent empirical work following the Institutional Collective Action (ICA) tradition has started to pay attention to the consequences of such functional fragmentation in the US context, however, with a lack of empirical evidence from Asia. This paper fills this gap by theorizing and examining the impact of functional fragmentation between agencies and departments located within a single government on their motivations to integrate and develop new administrative agencies for water governance in Chinese cities.

Described as “nine dragons governing water”, water governance at the local level in China has long been ineffective and inefficient due to functional fragmentation among municipal departments. Water pollution, quality, supply and sewage issues are each governed by different administrative units. This fragmentation in water governance has stimulated some local governments to redesign their water governance structure for better institutional integration. The novel governance design is achieved by forming new overarching Water Affairs Bureau, which assumes all functional responsibility over water issues.

To study the emerging trend in institutional integration among functional departments in local governments, this paper investigates the political and administrative motivations for the adoption of new water governance designs at the local level in China, drawing on the Institutional Collective Action (ICA) Framework. We hypothesize that cities with more severe water administrative fragmentation, higher administrative capacity and better fiscal health are more likely to adopt the new water governance design. Specifically, the functional fragmentation is measured as the level of inter-agency competition for local financial resources. Following the policy diffusion tradition, we also hypothesize that the higher the percentage of neighboring cities having adopted the Water Affairs Bureaus, the more likely the city is to adopt the same form of agency.

With a panel data set of 283 cities in China from 2000 to 2012, we examine the drivers for the adoption of Water Affairs Bureaus in Chinese municipal governments using Event History Analysis (EHA). The data are collected from China City Statistical Yearbook and other sources. Preliminary results support the effects of functional fragmentation and policy diffusion on the likelihood of local water administrative integration.