Research On The Governance Of Municipal District Government In China

Holisitic governance theory has emerged since the1990s, to a certain degree, it is a heritage and further development of traditional governance theory. As far as the target problem, supporting conditions and theoretic analytical value are concerned, holistic governance theory is useful to analyse the reform and change of local government in China. The operation of the Municipal District is one essential part of the entire local governmental practice. It is necessary to understand when the dominating logic underpinning of the general practice of local government since reform&opening policy was implemented. The co-existence of vertical administrative contracting and horizontal competition among different local governments, the co-existence of separation of vertical administrative power and horizontal concentration of power, the co-existence of deviated public offical performance-evaluation system and autonomy of local government, the co-existence of strong incentive mechanism and weak monitoring mechanism, these demonstrated the implied operation logics of contemperorary local government of China. At this stage, the power fragmentation in the practical governance of municipal district are mainly reflected by heavy overlap of institutions and functions, and power friction involved public affairs division and proper distribution of financial resources between municipal government and municipal district government. The further dilemmas in the practical governance of municipal district government are, the governance of municipal district government which was dominated by the above logics, the municipal district government having to participate in the general game, but it has less resources to support its competition. To a certain degree, the governmance dilemma of municipal district government is an epitome of the full governance dilemma of entire local government. It is useless to ask municipal district government to transform its function from economic participation to public service if the dominating logics were not changed first. It’s a fact that municipal district government has struggled between the role of economic operator and manager of public affairs, its main role still needs to be clarified. Returning to the traditional role of manager of public affairs will be helpful to solve the governance dilemma of municipal district government and mitigate the power friction between municipal government and municipal district government. From the perspective of holistic governance theory, it is necessary to adjust internal power relation between municipal government and municipal district government, to change institutional integration among different departments of municipal district government, to construct public governance system led by municipal district government and supplemented by social orgnizations and marketing mechanism, in order to reform the trapped governance of municipal district government. In summary, the strategy of conducting holistic governance reform on municipal district government is a better choice in comparsion with other policy proposals, but, on the other side of the equation, it undoutedly proposes a significant challenge to the the policy ability of our government.