Institutional change and the effectiveness of supply of rural water conservancy in China

This research examines institutional change’s influence on rural water conservancy supply and tries to explain the logic of rural public goods supply in China. In particular, my research will focus on rural water conservancy supply institutions’ functions in the collapse and the reestablishment of effective rural water conservancy supply system since the reform era. I will pay attention to the mechanism of institutional change in rural water conservancy supply issues. The research is innovative because it focuses on different conservancy supply institutions and the collapse and reestablishment of rural water conservancy system in modern China. The research will supply information of social groups’ functions in institutional development and changes. It will bring a new perspective to explain rural China’s development and reforms through rural water conservancy issues. Empirically, it will also bring in some ideas to express problems of low effectiveness of rural public goods supply in China. Since there is a lack of in-depth systematic study of China’s rural water conservancy supply in the western academic context, this research will mainly take the method of case study by using conservancy supply cases in the market reform era and the new socialist countryside era to find the relationship between supply methods and supply effectiveness of rural water conservancy supply in places of Central and Western China. Major theories of institutionalism will be utilized to verify findings from fieldwork. In particular, public goods theories will be applied in the research in order to examine various rural water conservancy supply methods in different eras. Property rights theory can be used to explain motivations and effectiveness of different water conservancy supply methods and institutional dilemma in different time periods. Institutional change theories will be applied to investigate how initiatives and actions of social groups can affect the effectiveness of water conservancy supply. Taken together, my research will try to combine institutional change theory, property rights theory and public goods theories to study the development and evolution of water conservancy supply in rural China. This research finds that market-driven rural water conservancy supply institutions could not work well and caused the collapse of conservancy supply system while polycentric conservancy supply institutions can help the government and different social groups to find appropriate positions in conservancy supply issues. This research offers significant empirical materials of the change of rural public goods supply in China which fills relevant research gap. This research also proves that only effective cooperation between the government and social groups can establish suitable institutional arrangements for rural water conservancy supply issues.