The core purpose of this visit is to conduct fieldwork in China’s Pearl River Basin (about 2 months), which helps to support the empirical part and comparative part of my Ph.D. research: The Legitimacy in the transition of China’s Water Quality Management. More specially, I have put forward the following hypotheses and questions based on my first year's research, and now I need to further verify these hypotheses and answer these questions by conducting a field study.
(1) Current Hypotheses: After China’s vertical management reform, the governance arrangement in China shows a similar but different pattern with the multi-level governance in the Netherlands, and also present the characters of “selective implementation” in water quality management.
(2) Further Research: Question ①: Under this governance arrangement, how does China's administrative agencies at different levels “selectively” implement water policies and water laws from higher hierarchy, or from other departments ? what are the problems in practice and whether modern governance methods have been used to alleviate these problems (for example, the programmatic approach, the Performance Measurement System)? If so, what effect has been achieved?
Question ②:Under this governance arrangement, how do China’s administrative agencies “selectively ” implement regulations on factories to protect water quality? what are the problems in practice? Can it achieve relatively common and continuous compliance with environmental law? whether modern governance methods have been used to alleviate this problems (for example, the automation technologies for monitoring water quality )? If so, what effect has been achieved?