Policy implementation through performance measurement: A study of water pollution remediation in China's Huai River Basin

Abstract

AbstractPerformance‐oriented management has been proposed as a remedy to policy implementation failure, which is a persuasive woe globally. Recent scholarship on policy implementation through performance measurement and management focuses on client‐oriented services, with less attention paid to the inadequacy of performance indicators in covering all desirable policy goals and in incentivizing all government officials in a non‐client‐oriented service arena, for instance, environmental governance. Based on station‐level water quality data before and after the implementation of China's Huai River Basin Water Quality Accountability Program, we utilize a difference‐in‐differences (DiD) method to investigate how various water quality indicators in the Huai River Basin (HRB) have responded to the new personnel‐based performance measurement system which aimed to enhance environmental policy implementation at the local level. We show that the program succeeded in motivating government officials to meet targeted indicators, but it also led to the worsening of non‐targeted ones. We also find that the impact of this personnel‐based program was sensitive to personal and contextual factors: it affected younger local officials more strongly than those who were older and saw a more limited prospect for promotion. These findings provide evidence for the effectiveness of the personnel‐based measurement system, which may be considered by other countries, particularly those with authoritarian regimes and significant policy implementation failures. At the same time, complementary measures such as institutional arrangements that discover and report omitted important performance aspects, should be considered to safeguard the possible pitfalls of the system.