Summary Social service contracting between governments and nonprofit organizations has received increasing popularity in China and has aroused enthusiasm in engaging nonprofit organizations in governance issues. This study argues that service contracting, driven by New Public Management tenets, may unexpectedly evolve toward collaborative governance (CG) by creating and consolidating necessary conditions of CG. Practices in Shanghai present evidence that governments and contracting nonprofits jointly make decisions, enforce regulatory functions, set rules, and improve community governance. The analysis shows that over time contracting may lead to generation of mutual trust, acquisition of governing resources, and consolidation of collaborative accountability. The evolutionary perspective provides not only a contingent way to develop CG in a context of heavy social control but also a theoretical link between New Public Management and New Public Governance. Copyright © 2017 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Successful adoption of collaborative service delivery requires that governments develop better capacity to handle potential pitfalls. In this essay, Yijia Jing of Fudan University and E. S. Savas of the City University of New York provide a framework that compares and contrasts the management practices in China and America. Both nations favor collaborative service delivery and engage in it extensively. Can China’s state‐affiliated strategy and the United States’ competition‐oriented strategy both work effectively? Such distinct systems, embedded in vastly different socioeconomic and political institutional environments decisively influence the effectiveness of collaborative service delivery management in the two countries.

In the West, limited government capacity to solve environmental problems has triggered the rise of a variety of "nonstate actors" to supplement government efforts or provide alternative mechanisms for addressing environmental issues. How does this development - along with our efforts to understand it - map onto environmental governance processes in China? China's efforts to address environmental issues reflect institutionalized governance processes that differ from parallel western processes in ways that have major consequences for domestic environmental governance practices and the governance of China "going abroad." China's governance processes blur the distinction between the state and other actors; the "shadow of the state" is a major factor in all efforts to address environmental issues. The space occupied by nonstate actors in western systems is occupied by shiye danwei ("public service units"), she hui tuanti ("social associations") and e-platforms, all of which have close links to the state. Meanwhile, international NGOs and multinational corporations are also significant players in China. As a result, the mechanisms of influence that produce effects in China differ in important ways from mechanisms familiar from the western experience. This conclusion has far-reaching implications for those seeking to address global environmental concerns, given the importance of China's growing economy and burgeoning network of trade relationships.

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Performance measurement (PM) has been widely used in China's public sector to enhance performance and ensure accountability. Like in other countries, PM in China is an arena of political management and manipulation by which political priorities are articulated and political loyalty and responsiveness are sought. This paper develops a regime-centered analytical framework to understand the political nature of China's PM. It identifies major political structures that influence the adoption and functioning of PM in China, including the unified political and administrative system, the Chinese developmental state and its performance legitimacy strategy, the unitary but decentralized intergovernmental systems, and the bureaucratic culture and informal rules. Despite their constraining effects, these structural attributes of the Chinese political system fundamentally account for the rise and popularity of PM in China.

For more than six decades, Public Administration and Development has witnessed the way practitioners' and scholars' understanding of public administration for development has evolved. This issue has the objective of reviewing the general trends and knowledge gaps and pinpointing new research topics. Several key aspects of public administration for development were discussed in the 'Symposium on Public Administration for Development: Trends and the Way Forward'. It was held at Fudan University in Shanghai in May-June 2014 to celebrate the 65th anniversary of the journal. This opening essay captures the global trends, setting out its implications for the search into alternative models of public administration and development, particularly reflecting on Asia. The forthcoming Post-2015 Development Agenda and the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) promoted by the United Nations will pose major challenges as the public administrations are ill-prepared to deal with it. The seven essays themselves engage in key areas of unfinished businesses in setting a research agenda for debates in the future. The authors present a comprehensive, state of the art of the knowledge and the main debates in their areas of expertise. In doing so, they cover a wide range of topics that are relevant for practitioners, students and scholars interested in public administration in both transitional and developing countries.

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SUMMARYThe increasing demands for public services, growing resource externalisation and decentralisation have driven Chinese governments to seek alternative means of service delivery. This article addresses the largely ignored outsourcing practice in China. Lack of awareness of and research on the widespread outsourcing was a result of the conceptual barriers created by China's economic transition and its choice of incremental reform path. By decomposing national fiscal expenditures, the article finds that from 2002 to 2004, outsourcing accounted for about one-third of the total governmental services expenditures and demonstrated a trend of continuous growth. Such developments effectively transformed the basic landscape of public service delivery and created significant external dependence. Within just three decades, China has quickly shifted from an omnipotent state to an 'incomplete' state. The capacity of the administrative hierarchy has become severely constrained. Nonetheless, the political risks of the macro-level transformation are largely mitigated at the micro-level by mechanisms of public-private cooperation. These developments are embedded in informal arrangements that, remarkably, maintain the survival of the current power structure.