| Cooperative Governance refers to the process and the all approaches taken in the process that within a certain scope, the government, economic organizations, social organizations and the public, with protecting and enhancing public interests as their objectives and existing laws and regulations as their common norms, administrate together social public affairs through comprehensively participation, equally negotiation, endeavoringly cooperation and jointly action under the government’s guidance.Cooperative Governance Theory emerged at the beginning of1990s, which now has become one of the path alternatives for many countries. From the scope of the whole globe, it is the output of the background of mal-performance of government governance, increasingly strengthening of the civil society, unceasingly enhancement of citizens’democratic consciousness and capacity and daily development of e-government. Seen from China’s practice, reform and opening-up has brought our country rapid economic development, gradually deepening of political reform, comprehensively prosperity of culture and art, and great improvement of the public’s living conditions. With progressive compelling of reforms and the rapid social change, various social problems and contradictions have been distinct and serious. For these ten years, though CPC and the government have made every effort to make the country prosperous with keen determination and have continuously innovated, the achievements have not been embodied in all fields, especially the public administration of local governments has encountered difficulties and is now trudging forward. To be objective, one of the most important reasons is that local governments have not get rid of the shackle of government-mono-centered governance, in which enough consensus and cooperation has not reaches between a local government, other government, the society and citizens. On the contrary, it often so sinks into contradictions and conflicts that it cannot release itself. Therefore, to make systematic study on the cooperative governance of local governments in our country with the guidance of Marxist’s position, opinion and methodology from the perspective of behavior, institution and interest is of great significance to further enrich and perfect the theory system of local government governance in our country, and practice of local government cooperative governance as well.As a statement of modern social governance, Cooperative Governance is a basic tendency of social governance model in the course of self-identity with reflexivity. In the process of modernized society reconstruction, the emergence of Cooperative Governance Theory and its growth in Chinese society has its rich theoretical origin. Firstly, cooperative thought of Marxism not only widen the scope of researches on Cooperative Governance, which provides us classical codes to study further the theory from the perspective of productivity, production relations and human’s sound development, but also gives us the methodological foundation to launch the Cooperative Governance Theory research, because the cooperative thought in Marxism shows the opinions of universal relation, change and development, and paradox, which undoubtedly give guidance to us as an important methodological guideline. Secondly, Synergetics is a new-emerging transactional subject, covering social science and social science, which has very broad adapting scope. It not only supplies a completely new thinking approach and path to solve large quantities of complicated problems existing in the field of the society and economics, engineering and management, science and researches, but also supplies direct theoretical foundation to the cooperative transference process of relative interest bodies in the course of local governments’cooperative governance. Particularly, oneness theory concerning self-organization and artificial equipment in Synergetics principle provides effective thought guidance for the design of cooperative governance mechanism. Thirdly, in Pluralist Democracy Theory, the descriptions about modern representative democracy and western interest groups, the ideas that advocates protecting democracy with decentralization and opposing right-monopolization, and opinions that diversified and independent groups effectively participating in policy process is important conditions to maintain the existence of democratic politics in the political system of a democratic society, gives theoretical references to Cooperative Theory. Besides, lately arising policy network theory tries to integrate mono-actor-approach and plural-actor-approach. Regardless it emphasizes the central governments, local actors or targeted groups in civil society, it may form a close network relation which is mutually relied, emerged and prosperous together. Such kind of relation is based in mutual needs, each side of which possesses its own objective and resources so that it adopts different strategies and gains different dominant position in the public policy enforcement. The opinions that this network relation may come from personal interactions between individual actors, or from structural interaction between some sector in central government and some industrial area, or even from the interaction between national agencies and the civil society provide direct theory support for Cooperative Governance.The cooperative governance of local governments has urgent practical requirement and important period value. Faced with our country’s social transformation and social model change, the governance paradigm should change from effective administration to democratic administration, from control-based to service-based, from mono-governing by the government to common-governing by the government and the society, from power-centralization to appropriately decentralization, from human-ruling to law-ruling. In the construction process of service-based government, the cultivation of modern citizens, promotion of democracy and law-ruling, enhancement of the party’s ruling ability and provision of the government’s good-qualified service are the core contents for service-based government, which also offer abundant conditions for local government’s cooperative governance. The emergence of China’s civil society not only facilitates the development of our country’s democratic politics and the innovation of ruling ideas, but also promotes the transference of our country’s governing paradigm and the optimum interaction between the government and the society, which provides strong social motives to reform our country’s traditional mono-governing model, and prepares necessary social conditions for cooperative governance of local governments as well. There exist policy-enforcement-blocking phenomena in the course of local government governance such as No-to-orders and Go-for-prohibitions and There are policies and we have measures. These phenomena result in that the fixed policy objectives cannot be realized well and sometimes they produce side social effect which betrays policy objectives so that the trust degree of the social public to the government will be decreased and the government authority will be washed away, even legitimacy crisis may arise. Reforming current policy enforcement model through cooperative governance to enhance local governments’policy enforcing ability has become a important issue to be solved urgently, and also supplies strong internal force for the government to step for cooperative governance. The propelling of our country’s local government cooperative governance has vital period value, which centralizes that cooperative governance helps to increase the public’s democracy consciousness and democratic participation ability, helps to promote the government’s role-change and establishment of service-based government, helps to supply qualified public goods and public service, and helps to optimize public policy and realize policy efficiency.The inter-governmental optimum interaction and cooperation is the generator and steering wheel of local governments’cooperative governance. The inter-governmental cooperation has its objective of public policy enforcement improvement, governing ability promotion and supply manifold and qualified alternative governing tools through social capital construction in cooperative governing process. Cooperation between local governments consists of vertical and horizontal orientations. Seen from current vertical governmental cooperation in our country, there exist the problems that central cooperative mechanism is not complete, that cooperative willing and ability for the local governments is not sufficient, that local governments’finance is not abundant, that power and role between the central government and local government is not clear, that departmental selfishness is serious, and that public issues are complicated which will cause difficulty in cooperate between the central government and the local government. The realization of vertical cooperation between the central government and the local government needs to strengthen the cooperation between the structure, the interest and the information. Due to the conflicts of local interests, imperfectness of cooperative mechanism, lack pf institution environment, bias of examination purpose and the twist of performance view, the competition, even the vicious competitive game between our local governments is becoming more and more rigid, while the mutually cooperative relations are daily becoming weak, which seriously affects the synthesized effect of national overall governance. In order to reduce Public Land Tragedy and Collective Action Plight in the horizontal cooperation process of the governments, and to establish optimum competitive-cooperative relations through repeatedly game-playing between local governments with the result that effective cooperation can be achieved, the adjustment function of the central government should be promoted, long-run inter-governmental cooperative mechanism should be built up, interest allocation and complementary mechanism should be clarified and local examining and promotion mechanism should be modified.Practice of governments’governance has proved that mono-governing of the government, or only internal cooperation relying on the government distinctly cannot solve contemporary complicated and multiple social public problems. In this case, local governments’governance should take external exploration on the basis of effective cooperation inside the institution, seek for effective cooperation among the market, non-profit organizations and citizens outside the governmental institution, hat is to say, across-section cooperation should be realized. Firstly, the cooperation between the government and the market should be realized. Neither the government nor the market is almighty. The inevitability of government failure and market failure, and the complementary nature of both become the practical origin for the government and the market to cooperate. With the foundation of our country’s specified state situation and with reference to other country’s successful practices, the effective cooperation between local government and the market can take the initiative step such as the privatization of public sectors, contract-signing from the government and permission operation. Secondly, the cooperation between the government and non-profit organizations should be realized. Non-profit organization is an organizational state between the government and the market. According to the view of modern Public Administration Theory, both the government and NPO are public affairs administrators, the optimum interaction relations of the two help to enhance the efficiency of public administration. The cooperation between local government and NPO should obey the principle of state situation-based, government-leading and gradually-facilitation, the realization of which could be achieved through rationally distinguishing the role of local government and NPO, coordination the interest relations between local governments and NPO, circling the responsibility relations between the two, and the establishment of the mutual trust relations between the two. Thirdly, the cooperation between the government and citizens should be realized. As an ancient country with thousand-year history, the relationship between the government and citizens has experienced the historical change from reining, ruling to interaction. In the real world, as to the relations between the government and citizens, there exists problems that the orientation of local government role is not clear, the communication between the two is not smooth, and the consciousness and the ability of cooperating with each other is not sufficient. Under the political principle of people sovereignty and people’s democracy, the cooperation between the government and citizens should have the premise of mutually equality, mutually trust and optimum cooperation, and be enhanced by means of rebuilding local government’s power and ability on public service, perfecting institutional arrangement for the cooperation between the government and citizens, and cultivating citizens’positively participating consciousness and ability.It is inevitably that the cooperative governance of local governance will meet with many problems and barriers such as governability, legitimacy, effectiveness and accountability, which also exist in reining and ruling models of government administration. Therefore, failures that may arise in cooperative governance should carry out meta-governance with the consideration of governing factors such as trust and social capital, participation and containment, leading and enabling. As a new governing model, the future tendency and action of cooperative governance will mainly emphasize on the reconstruction of institutions. As for the change of cooperative governance system, the focus will be stepping multi-leveled governance system, building up cooperative mechanism, establishing integrated government and developing multi-centered governing system. As for the cooperative governance network construction, the emphasis should be on the transference of the cooperative governing tools and establishing partnership cooperative governance network. As for the development of cooperative governance, power decentralization to the local should be enlarged, local governments’governing ability should be reinforced, governance participating structure of the local affairs should be constructed, and accountability mechanism of local governance should be continuously innovated and perfected. |
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