Rural Policy Implementation in Contemporary China: New Socialist Countryside by Anna L. Ahlers

Author:Anna L. Ahlers [Ahlers, Anna L.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Ethnic Studies, Public Policy, Social Science, Political Science, Regional Studies, General
ISBN: 9781317970613
Google: Gz1PEAAAQBAJ
Goodreads: 20607284
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2014-01-10T00:00:00+00:00

Managing villages’ and villagers’ participation

The implementation stage of a policy is where public participation, if it happens at all, can take place in autocratic countries. Based on the fact that public influence was perceivable in most of the studied cases of Politics and Policy Implementation in the Third World, Merilee Grindle provocatively concluded that: “it is likely that policies and programs will be even more difficult to manage and predict and even more subject to alteration in the Third World than elsewhere” (Grindle 1980: 19). She argued that “flexibility in policy execution may even be part of a polity-wide accommodation and conflict resolution system used by political elites to maintain the often tenuous cohesion of the political community itself” (Grindle 1980: 18). While Grindle tended to analyze the situation from the perspective of the public and focused on the opportunities that were available for working towards the “good” implementation of policies in autocratic political environments, the herein assumed political elite perspective largely reflects the argumentation of the ‘top-down literature’ in the China Studies field, which usually perceives the flexibility and learning capacity of the Chinese policy process as a measure of the adaptability and effectiveness of the political regime. Substantiating these important but rather abstract aspects, public response and participation examined during the New Countryside construction acted as a certain constraint on local implementors’ agency and as a crucial resource for securing the effectiveness and, not least, legitimacy of BNSC implementation on the ground.

This is important, because the ultimate goal of BNSC resided in the comprehensive transformation of rural China, in material and immaterial terms. Implementing BNSC projects on the ground had a serious impact on the lives of village residents, since the aim was not only to modernize agriculture, expand wage-labor opportunities and enhance the provision of public goods, but often also to change the whole economic, social and political geography of the territory through an engineered process of urbanization and commercialization. Infrastructural construction and the introduction of new agricultural technologies often drew support from the villagers. But moves made by township and county governments to persuade them to leave their old homes and move into “new rural neighborhoods,” for example, were sometimes greeted differently. Even plans for investment in the village infrastructure, however, could draw strong opposition from residents, since these usually involved demands for a matching contribution from the village collective or even from each household. As a result, the realization of some projects could become delicate issues for local governments, involving petitioning and fierce protest of all kind, violent action being taken against local-government facilities or representatives (Schubert and Ahlers 2012a).

The village is described as the most important entity for BNSC implementation in virtually all related documents from the central to local levels. Village residents’ bottom-up democratic decision-making during their village’s development planning process is acknowledged as a basis for successful local policy adaptation and their voluntary participation in BNSC projects is emphasized as an elementary requirement. However, although “democratic administration” is one of the key

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.