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Explora: Environment
and Resource The development of the river chief in Nantong and Huzhou

2. Methods and data chief that were issued by all levels of the administrative
hierarchy associated with Wuxi, Nantong, and Huzhou.
This study is designed around a traditional small-n case The documents included among others: policy texts,
study, which takes the transfer of the river chief system legislative releases, manuals, and the One River and
41
from Wuxi as an example of how different motivational One Policy plan. 41,42 To support this data, we also
factors and structural constraints impact the transfer examined official government work reports associated
process and outcomes. Specifically, we selected two with the implementation of the two river chief systems
representative prefecture-level cities to observe how they and performance evaluation reports of river and lake
transfer the river chief model. The idea was to investigate management and protection in the two regions.
the effect of modifying a model on the outcomes in the
transferring jurisdiction. We selected Nantong because In addition, we consulted a range of secondary
it lies in Jiangsu Province, which was the home of Wuxi, documents extending from official press releases-
thus reducing the environmental differences discussed relevant articles and news stories (both in Chinese and
above. Besides, the transfer occurred after the higher-level English) to organizational reports issued by international
provincial government introduced a requirement that all organizations (such as the World Wide Fund for Nature)
and international governing organizations (such as the
municipalities produce river chiefs. This requirement not World Bank and the International Monetary Fund).
only provided an incentive for engaging in the transfer
process, but also set a base model for the jurisdictions that To gather this data, we utilized open websites found
had not already developed their river chief systems in the through DuckDuckGo and Google searches, internal
province. ministerial and government search engines, institutional
databases (Web of Science), and archival research within
Our second case, Huzhou, was selected as a comparison relevant ministries and departments. To prevent being
case as it fell under the jurisdiction of Zhejiang Province. overly influenced by the tendency to promote political
This provided a different setting and underlying structural performance in official reports, we also collected social
factors from those that embedded actors in Nantong. In media reports and interviews to strengthen our research
addition, unlike Nantong, Huzhou transferred the river findings. Finally, based on 40,000 words (in Chinese) of
chief system without being subjected to a requirement from case material, the qualitative data analysis software NVivo
the Zhejiang Provincial authorities. This allowed Huzhou 10.0 (Lumivero, USA) was used for coding and recording
a degree of freedom in transferring and developing its the text.
river chief system that is unavailable to policymakers in
Nantong. We argue that this structural difference (when With the support of the National Social Science Fund
combined with other motivational factors) led to a much of China, we also conducted a series of field investigations
more dynamic river chief policy based on a mixture of what in Nantong and Huzhou between October and November
others had done but modified to better fit their context and 2019. These consisted of 26 semi-structured interviews with
the staff of the river chief’s office in the two municipalities.
needs.
These interviews were semi-structured and based on the
As Table 1 illustrates, this study utilized numerous following questions:
methods to collect data from a range of sources. The core (i) Did you engage in any type of policy transfer when
data used in this study consisted of official government developing your river chief system?
documents associated with the introduction of the river (ii) If you engaged in policy transfer, can you explain why?

Table 1. Data sources and classifications

Data sources Data classification Number of documents
Primary data Transcripts of semi-structured interviews (in Chinese) 26
On-site recordings of the debriefing sessions (in Chinese) 3
Author’s investigation diary (in Chinese) 2
Secondary data Policy documents (in Chinese and English) 10
Internet search data: articles, NGO/IGO documents, social media coverage, and government website 200
coverage (in Chinese and English)
Internal materials of government departments (manuals, assessment documents, and research reports [in 15
Chinese and English])
Abbreviations: IGO: Intergovernmental organization; NGO: Non-governmental organization.

Volume 2 Issue 3 (2025) 4 doi: 10.36922/EER025110018