Government Contracting Services to Social Organisations in China: A Review of Research for Future Enquiry

Regina Enjuto Martinez,Jude Howell,Yuanyuan Qu

doi:10.1017/s1474746421000622

Abstract

Contracting of social services has been adopted in China as an innovation in welfare provision. This article reviews the emerging literature on contracting of services to social organisations in China in order to identify lines of further enquiry. It reviews research published in the English and Chinese languages up to 2018. We identify three distinct narratives: public sector reform, improvement of welfare service quality and capacity, and transformation of state-society relations. We contrast the identified narratives with the empirical evidence produced for the Chinese case. We demonstrate that, despite contradictory empirical evidence, the premise that contracting improves public sector efficiency and quality of services predominates. The narrative that contracting transforms state-society relations is contested. This article contributes to the understanding of how contracting of services is justified in theory and practice, and proposes an agenda for future social policy research on contracting of services to social organisations in China.

Highlights

China’s economic development, rapid demographic change and booming urbanisation have led to growing demands for welfare services
We demonstrated the prevalence of narratives that contracting improves public sector efficiency, capacity and quality of services, despite the absence of or contradictory empirical evidence to support this
It appears as if services contracting has achieved irrefutable successes, which makes the marketisation of welfare services seem a necessary, inevitable and rational direction for China’s welfare system reforms

Summary

Introduction

China’s economic development, rapid demographic change and booming urbanisation have led to growing demands for welfare services. We highlight how, to a certain extent, the literature has approached the subject from an empirical perspective and lacked interrogation of theoretical and ideological frameworks informing the adoption of the policy of contracting of services, such as NPM. This has led to the literature generally echoing the government’s policy agenda and seemingly justifying the policy change. Databases searched EBSCO JSTOR Project MUSE ProQuest Scopus SpringerLink Web of Science Internet databases (Google/Google Scholar) cnki.com

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Conclusion