This paper attempts to bridge critical institutionalism and fragmented authoritarianism in China. Moving beyond the predictive functionalist perspective and the overemphasis on state primacy, the paper focuses on how top‐down water policies are exercised by local agencies, collective communities, and individuals at the county level and below. Through a case of irrigation management in the upper reaches of the Yellow River, this paper posits that institutional bricolage and fragmentation are prevalent despite the imposition of the authoritarian state. Moreover, it shows that local water policy implementation is reshaped by various contested discourse, the pursuit of different interests, social relations, and broad transformative forces. This high degree of diversity not only manifests an increasing institutional flexibility, as water policies are operated outside China's hierarchical bureaucratic system, but also is embedded in an era of socio‐economic transformation where the processes of industrialization, urbanization, and neo‐liberalization have changed the dynamics of rural governance.
c school of Humanities & social science, the chinese university of Hong Kong, shenzhen, china; d center for population and Development studies, renmin university of china, Beijing, china; e Key laboratory of Geographic Information science, ministry of education, east china normal university, shanghai, china
While much of the scholarly work on the development of non-governmental organizations (NGOs) in China focuses on their relations with the state, this paper adopts an anthropological approach to explore previously understudied peasant–NGO relations through the lens of a village-level post-earthquake recovery project in Sichuan. The findings highlight three main types of gaps between the NGO and local villagers: the gaps between the villagers’ immediate needs and the NGO's long-term development plan; the gaps between the villagers’ pragmatic concerns and the “building a new socialist countryside” campaign; and the gaps between the private and collective economies. In spite of the project's unsatisfactory outcome, the NGO did not consider the project a failure. We argue that these gaps were, to a great extent, attributable to the continuing development of the institutional values of NGOs, which guide the transition of Chinese NGOs from traditional charities to modern philanthropic organizations.
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