What Makes the River Chief System in China Viable? Examples from the Huaihe River Basin

Abstract

Eco-environmental issues are a complex problem for the development of contemporary China, among which river water pollution control is one of the most challenging issues. In the continuous pursuit of river pollution control, the Chinese government has adopted the river chief system (RCS) model to appoint government officials as river chiefs of each section. This review first analyzes the water quality data of the Huaihe River basin over the past five years using Origin 2021. A violin plot shows that the water quality of the Huaihe River basin improved, and CODMn and NH3-N were significantly reduced. Secondly, this review analyzes the effectiveness of the river chief system according to the “embeddedness theory”, which argues that the river chief system has been integrated into the traditional hierarchy of environmental governance in China through institutional embeddedness to activate the vitality of the subject’s control and spatial embeddedness to eliminate fragmented watershed governance and promote governance capacity. Practical suggestions and initiatives were proposed based on the existing RCS, including the rule of law construction, regional collaborative management, and public participation to restore the local ecology.

Effect of River Chief System on Carbon Emission Efficiency: Evidence from China

“…The river chief system clarifies the local authority and responsibility for governance and advocates the establishment of a regional decision-making center to solve the conflict of interest between departments and the problem of supervision [30]. Similarly, Zhang et al believe the RCS activates the vitality of subject control through institutional embedding, eliminates the fragmentation of watershed governance through spatial embedding, and integrates the regional ecosystem into the traditional Chinese environmental governance hierarchy [31]. Scholars recognize Institutional Innovations in RCS, but most of them hold a dual attitude toward their environmental governance effects.…”

“…Scholars recognize Institutional Innovations in RCS, but most of them hold a dual attitude toward their environmental governance effects. On the one hand, scholars acknowledge that RCS has been very successful in solving the multi-departmental water control dilemma in River and Lake Protection [31]. Liu et al used a cooperative game approach to demonstrate that RCS is an inevitable outcome of the Sustainable Water Resource Management Affairs (SWRMA) cross-regional negotiations and that RCS helps to reduce transaction costs and external costs in cross-regional negotiations…”

How the River Chief System Achieved River Pollution Control: Analysis Based on AGIL Paradigm

“…Successful management of the Rhine River resulted from the cooperation of nine countries, including Germany, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, and Belgium [21,75]. China's watershed management is facing the problems of "vertical fragmentation" and "horizontal fragmentation" of intergovernmental cooperation [17,24]. Given the influence of "level efficiency", the policy reaches the grass-roots turnover level, with too many links and too long a cycle, resulting in disconnection between superior decision making and grass-roots execution, which results in execution deviation and "vertical fragmentation" [76].…”

“…In addition, the "Environmental Protection Law of the People's Republic of China" (hereafter referred to as the "Environmental Protection Law") requires governments at all levels to carry out water pollution control work within their respective administrative areas under the principle of territoriality [21,22], but different administrative concepts, levels of emphasis on work and implementation preferences among regional governments reduce the effectiveness of communication [23]. At the same time, counties, cities and provinces in the lower reaches of the basin hope that those in the upper reaches actively carry out water pollution control to reduce the control cost in their regions [23,24], but the continuous "game" and "free rider" behavior will eventually make water pollution control fall into a "prisoner's dilemma" and evolve into a "tragedy of the commons" [25,26]. The public nature of basins also suggests that the days of single-actor or monopolies of administrative programs and processes are gone forever [27], and that the traditional governance model can no longer meet the needs of modern governance [28]; however, collaboration is usually considered an effective way to solve "fragmentation" [7], which requires China's water management to change from a hierarchical management system with overlapping responsibilities to a collaborative management model with clear responsibilities [19,[29][30][31].…”

The Rise and Transfer of the River Chief System: A Historical review of a Chinese Phenomenon and its potential to transfer to the global community

“…Based on Wuxi's 'accomplishment' in cleaning river and lake pollution and bringing formal accountability to the system of water management, other jurisdictions began looking to Wuxi as a model or using it as the basis of their own experiments with river chief systems (Zhang et al 2022). While some of the cities and towns in Jiangsu province followed Wuxi with the implementation of their own river chief systems, the General Office of Jiangsu Provincial Government issuing the Notice on the Implementation of the Dual RLS in the Main Tributaries of Taihu Lake in 2008, the river chief system was officially promoted by the Jiangsu government as a policy across the province.…”