Page 78 - EER-2-3

Explora: Environment

and Resource

ORIGINAL RESEARCH ARTICLE
The development of the river chief in Nantong

and Huzhou: Policy transfer in an authoritarian
system

1
David P. Dolowitz * and Ye Xiong 2
1 Department of Politics, Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Liverpool,
Liverpool, United Kingdom
2 Department of Public Administration, Institute of Environment and Health, Nanjing University of
Information Science and Technology, Nanjing, Jiangsu, China

Abstract

The river chief system is an institutional innovation designed to mitigate the
fragmentation of watershed governance in China. The idea was to develop offices
of river chiefs and designate named individuals as responsible for water quality
across all regions and levels of government. This article examines the mechanisms
that led to the transfer of the river chief model from Wuxi to the Jiangsu Provincial
government, Nantong, and Huzhou. The objective is to examine how and why
Nantong officials created a virtual replica of the Jiangsu provincial policy, while
Huzhou officials transformed the original Wuxi model to form their unique river
*Corresponding author: chief. To do this, we undertook an extensive review of the core documents related to
David P. Dolowitz the river chief systems in Nantong and Huzhou, which led to a series of interviews,
(dolowitz@liv.ac.uk)
confirming our understanding of the procedures and outcomes of the transfer
Citation: Dolowitz DP, Xiong process. The result demonstrated the importance of motivation, structural context,
Y. The development of the river
chief in Nantong and Huzhou: and the ability to engage in re-engineering in policy transfer to understand the
Policy transfer in an authoritarian outcomes of the transfer process. As such, this study demonstrates, unlike much of
system. Explora Environ Resour. the existing literature, that these aspects are worth further study when investigating
2025;2(3):025110018.
doi: 10.36922/EER025110018 the policy transfer process.
Received: March 11, 2025
Keywords: River chief; Policy transfer; Learning; China
1st revised: April 25, 2025
2nd revised: May 5, 2025
Accepted: May 15, 2025
1. Introduction
Published online: July 21, 2025
After the open door policy was launched in the late 1970s and 1980s, the Chinese central
Copyright: © 2025 Author(s).
This is an Open-Access article government and Chinese Communist Party (CCP) began shifting decision-making
distributed under the terms of the powers to lower-level governing divisions. Initially, this focused on reducing restrictions
Creative Commons Attribution on lower-level governments’ ability to engage in (or encourage) private market activities
License, permitting distribution,
and reproduction in any medium, (including the launch of special enterprise zones). Based on the success and progress of
provided the original work is these initial reforms, the party and government began to introduce policies designed to
properly cited. decentralize elements of environmental policymaking and implementation (particularly
th
th
Publisher’s Note: AccScience after the 18 and 19 national congresses of the CCP). As a result, when a cyanobacteria
Publishing remains neutral with outbreak occurred in Lake Taihu, the Jiangsu Provincial authority authorized a pilot
regard to jurisdictional claims in
published maps and institutional project that led to the first river chief system designed to address the outbreak without
affiliations. turning to central authorities. 1
Volume 2 Issue 3 (2025) 1 doi: 10.36922/EER025110018