Abstract
The Chinese central government has recognized that village–government networks are promising for the sustainable development of rural villages. Though many local governments tend to deploy various hands-on or hand-off governance tools to influence the sustainable development of village-governance networks, the number of villages successfully achieving “good governance” is still rare. Therefore, this study empirically elaborates on the application of three classic tools of governance networks, analyzing how leaders of local government and village communities influence the effectiveness of these tools. The data were collected by snowball interviews, careful observations, and documentary analysis in Xiaonan village, a representatively successful case of rural-village governance networks in China. We detected that governance tools are often inadequately used and under-development in Chinese rural-village governance networks, accompanying a strong interaction between the effectiveness of tools and leadership. Excellent leadership is necessary for a successful rural-village governance network and its scaling-up.
Highlights
Since the 1990s, the governance-network frame (GNF) has become the dominant theoretical paradigm in analyzing the complexity of collaborative governance in the context of the decreasing influence of bureaucratic authorities and the increasing dependence on partnerships [1,2,3,4]
Rural-village governance networks consist of actors who are interdependent and whose complex interactions that produce governance solutions and result from the initialization of relationships between actors, as summarized by Klijn and Koppenjan (2012) [7]
Process Tracing in a Single Deep Case Study. To answer why these widely-used governance tools mentioned above seldom contribute to success in real Chinese rural network governance and to explore whether and how the leadership of network governance can influence their effectiveness, a deeper investigation into the process of rural network governance in China is needed
Summary
Since the 1990s, the governance-network frame (GNF) has become the dominant theoretical paradigm in analyzing the complexity of collaborative governance in the context of the decreasing influence of bureaucratic authorities and the increasing dependence on partnerships [1,2,3,4]. Strands of literature have built and combined their conceptual lenses with empirical knowledge, leading to wide advocacy for the merits of governance networks in metropolitan and rural development [5,6]. Rural-village governance networks consist of actors who are interdependent and whose complex interactions that produce governance solutions and result from the initialization of relationships between actors, as summarized by Klijn and Koppenjan (2012) [7]. The rural village governance network, in particular, is a relevant empirical field for the GNF, because many demographic, social and economic changes have been happening, and grass-roots democracy and self-governance have been rapidly developing [8]. Only a few villages have achieved the expected development, and their performance has depended heavily on whether the organization has the core competencies that are essential for the operational success of democratic governance networks [12]. Scholars have usually emphasized the role of leadership as one key competency, especially for immature governance networks [13,14]
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