Research On River Owner System Of Changzhou Xinbei District From The Perspective Of Co-Governance

With the rapid urbanization process and the development of modern industry,water environment issue has become more prominent every day.It has severely impacted water safety and people’s livelihood.However,as water environment belongs to all,the owner and responsible department for this issue was not clear in the past.The protection and treatment of rivers,lakes and water environment were fragmented and managed by many different departments.To avoid “Tragedy of the commons”,Wuxi built its “river owner system” in2007 by delegating chairman of each regional party and government department as “river owner” of important rivers in this region.The “river owner” takes full responsibility for water pollution protection and treatment as well as comprehensive environment treatment.This water environment treatment mode was independently created by Chinese people and already starts to spread nationwide.Relying on the authority of each “river owner”,multiple first layer government departments can gather their power together in a short time to significantly improve river ecosystem and water quality.However,negative voices are still around for this mode.On the one hand,it relies on rule of man rather than rule of law.In essence,it is still like a campaign.On the other hand,Long term corporation between different departments are very difficult to build.Issues such as low public participation still exist.Recently,we’ve started to see a growing research interest in the “River Owner System”.Many research perspectives and theories starts to show up within the academic circle.Co-governance mechanism has been widely used in recent years in public administration practices home and abroad,achieving relatively good results.This new governance mechanism was based on formal and multi-subject cross-department collaboration with a purpose to address complicated public affairs.This article takes the perspective of co-governance theory and Changzhou Xinbei District as its research subject.It combines the research methods of literature analysis,case study and questionnaire survey to reveal the six major issues and their root causes of “river owner system”,namely “rule of man” resulted in excessive dependence on administrative authority,lack of top level coordination mechanism,lack of scientific management strategy and fund safeguard,inflexibility regime,insufficient long term collaboration and low public participation.In the last part,taking into account the advanced experiences of water environment co-governance mechanism both home and abroad,this article proposes to build a “river owner system” supported by co-governance mechanism in four major aspects: legal support,common thinking,cross-department collaboration and multi-subject participation.Only by effective co-governance can we solve the dilemma of current “river owner system”and ensure long term protection of water environment.