| Indicators are important tools in national governance,and their governance attributes are particularly prominent in the practice of national governance in China.In the process of reforming the public service supply system,a set of well-designed technical systems has been formed around indicators as a governance tool.Governance by indicator has become an implicit and important governance mechanism.Governance by indicator exists in public culture service,public sports service,public health service and other fields.It is an important governance means to control the behavior,process and result of the main service provider.It is also an inevitable choice under the background of the localization of public service supply and the diversification of supply subjects.Taking the National Basic Public Health Service Project as an example,this study adopts the method of case analysis to try to summarize and analyze the operational logic of the governance by indicator,the coping strategies of the governed subjects,and the effectiveness and limits of governance.From the perspective of the role of the government,China’s public service supply mechanism has gone through three stages of "government takeover","government absence"and"government return",forming a multi-supply mechanism of public services under the leadership of the government.It presents the characteristics of localization of supply responsibilities and diversification of supply subjects.At the same time,problems such as fragmentation and non-equalization of public service supply are prominent,and the nationalization of public services has become an important way to solve the dilemma of service supply.The nationalization of public services is a unified planning by the state of the system design,service content,expenditure responsibilities and leading units of public services.In this practice process,indicators have become an important tool for the state to manage all levels of government and functional departments.Based on this,a governance mechanism that runs through the operation system of public service supply is formed—governance by indicator.Based on the supply of basic public health services,the study found that the operation mechanism of "indicator generation-indicator decentralization-indicator monitoring-indicator assessment"was formed around indicators in the supply of public services,so as to realize the strong control over the content,process and results of public service provision.The governance by indicator in the supply of public services is that the superior formulates corresponding indicators on the quantity,quality and standards of public services,and then decentralizes and decomposes them at different levels;The amount of funds allocated and rewards or punishments are determined by the regular assessment of the implementation of the indicators of the providers,so as to ensure the implementation and execution of public service projects and ultimately achieve the goal of effective supply of public services.Under the pressure and incentives of the governance by indicator,the governed subjects also show some coping strategies.Local governments have adopted project execution strategies such as unified execution,ranking-based rewards and punishments,and diversity overweight;primary medical and health institutions have also demonstrated completion strategies such as customer competition,special "communication" and conservative completion.The behavioral strategies of the providers of public service supply affect the effect of the governance by indicator to a large extent.Finally,through the institutional analysis of the public service supply mechanism and the behavior analysis of the service providers,it is concluded that the governance by indicator plays a positive role in realizing the standardized supply of public services,promoting the target coupling of multiple providers,and improving the modernization level of public services.However,there are also the following governance limitations:the inability to reconcile the contradiction between service standardization and demand differentiation,the conflict between the concept of service competition and the practice of"service involution",the intensification of the game of public welfare and profit-seeking service motives.There is a potential to damage the efficiency of localized supply and multi-supply of public services,which needs to be further improved and perfected from the perspective of balancing instrumental rationality and value rationality. |
