The effectiveness of network administrative organizations in governing interjurisdictional natural resources
| Published date | 01 September 2023 |
| Author | Yixin Liu,Chao Tan |
| Date | 01 September 2023 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/padm.12834 |
ORIGINAL ARTICLE
The effectiveness of network administrative
organizations in governing interjurisdictional
natural resources
Yixin Liu
1
| Chao Tan
2
1
Askew School of Public Administration,
Florida State University, Tallahassee, USA
2
Guangdong Research Institute of Water
Resources and Hydropower, Guangzhou,
China
Correspondence
Yixin Liu, Askew School of Public
Administration, Florida State University,
028 Bellamy, Tallahassee, FL 32306, USA,
Email: yliu14@fsu.edu
Abstract
Can network administrative organizations (NAOs) improve
networks' ability to solve complex social and environmental
problems? This is a classical question in collaborative gover-
nance. The public management literature examines collabo-
rative outcomes at either the organization or the entire
network level, but has not addressed “edge level”outcomes
to evaluate structured interactions among network actors.
Therefore, we investigate outcomes in an interjurisdictional
area that reflect collaborative efforts between local govern-
ments. Recently, Guangdong Province in China enacted the
River Chief System, an institutional reform that mandates
the provincial government to establish an NAO to coordi-
nate intercity rivers' management. To assess how well the
reform has worked to reduce pollution, we employ the syn-
thetic control method using monthly water quality data
from 14 river monitoring sites in two neighboring cities.
Our results indicate that the reform reduced the inter-
jurisdictional river sites' pollution level effectively by 36% in
the following year. This preliminary finding contributes to
the collaborative governance theory and provides new evi-
dence on whether the NAO model improves the shared
outcomes between local governments.
1|INTRODUCTION
The question, “Is collaborative governance more effective than adversarial or managerial governance?”(Ansell &
Gash, 2008, p. 549) is central to public management. However, combining multiple organizations with different
Received: 11 May 2021 Revised: 6 January 2022 Accepted: 12 January 2022
DOI: 10.1111/padm.12834
932 © 2022 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Public Admin. 2023;101:932–952.wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/padm
interests into a governance network to achieve shared goals is difficult (Bodin, 2017; Ostrom, 2010). Management
problems in environmental governance can be described often as interdependent subproblems among network
members (Bodin, 2017). Local governments often face complex social and environmental conditions when governing
common-pool resources in fragmented jurisdictions. Their organizational goals may conflict with shared network-
level goals, and unclear responsibilities may aggravate free-riding behaviors among them. This collective action
dilemma limits local governments' ability to achieve shared environmental outcomes and leads to adversarial compe-
tition. In particular, if each local government prioritizes organizational benefits over the network-level benefits, the
outcomes for all will be worse in the long term.
After decades of development, public management scholarship has posited that collaborative governance is a
remedy for free-riding behaviors, and therefore, is an effective tool to improve network outcomes. Two major
research topics have emerged within this intellectual tradition on collaborative governance: (1) Motivation and for-
mation of collaborative governance, and (2) outcomes of collaborative governance (O'Toole Jr, 2015). This article is
consistent with the second topic, which emphasizes the way collaborative governance performs differently in varying
social and institutional contexts. In contrast to most studies on this topic, which are conducted in Western countries,
we investigate collaborative governance and its environmental outcomes in China.
Based upon the premises in the existing environmental management literature, we identify two theoretical gaps
in the discussion on forms of collaborative governance and their outcomes. First, scholars often treat collaboration
as a broad concept and examine its results, while the treatment of network structure is considered a “black box”
(Bitterman & Koliba, 2020, p. 638). Under different institutional conditions, networks form different structures that
yield highly varied outcomes (Milward & Provan, 1998). As Provan and Kenis (2008) suggested, network structures
can be summarized as three models: Participant-governed network; lead organization-governed network, and net-
work administrative organization (NAO). Therefore, investigating each of these network models' effectiveness is nec-
essary for public management scholars to study collaborative governance's outcomes properly.
Second, we lack “edge level”evidence of collaborative outcomes. Most of the outcome measurements of collaborative
governance are either at the organizational or network level. These units of analysis help us understand each network partic-
ipant's productivity and the entire network ecological system's effectiveness (Scott, 2015,2016;Yi,2018). However, the
central arenas of collaborative actions in environmental management are cross-boundary areas that require multiple net-
work members to manage them collectively (Emerson & Nabatchi, 2015). Studying environmental outcomes in cross-
boundary areas reflects what Bryson et al. (2016, p. 914) referred to as “shared core goals”of collaborative governance that
“...cannot easily be achieved except by collaborating.”
To fill both theoretical gaps, we focus on one specific form of collaboration: The NAO model, and extend Ansell
and Gash's (2008) question into our research question: Compared to noncollaborative governance, can the NAO
model improve environmental outcomes in cross-boundary areas?
Our study answers this question by investigating water pollution control in an interjurisdictional river in China.
China has a long history of suffering from water pollution as a trade-off with its economic development, and local
governments game and free-ride each other in environmental governance. In the case of rivers, the inner-city rivers'
water quality is often better than that in cross-boundary rivers. To resolve this governance dilemma, the Guangdong
provincial government enacted the River Chief System (RCS) at the beginning of 2018 to improve river management
and water quality. Before the RCS was enacted, neighboring cities self-governed interjurisdictional rivers. Since the
RCS has been implemented, the provincial government's river chief office has become the NAO and coordinates its
subordinate city governments' management of interjurisdictional rivers. This institutional reform provides a unique
opportunity to compare the network effectiveness between a fragmented local governance system and the NAO
model.
To evaluate this institutional reform's effect, we collected water quality data during 2017–2018 from monthly
samples of 14 river quality monitoring sites in the two most important industrial cities in Guangdong Province:
Shenzhen and Dongguan. Thirteen of our sample river sites are in inner-city locations in either city, and one treated
river site is at the two cities' interjurisdictional boundary. The synthetic control method allows us to identify the
LIU AND TAN 933
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