Hello everyone!
We have a major essay on the Taiwan issue in the works, needing a day or so of checking and polishing. It was an irresistible choice thanks to its distinguished author’s (Shi Yinhong 时殷弘) solitary reference to the ‘baseline of the Taiwan question’—we are of course dying to know what that is…
In the meantime though, here is a mini-classic of bureaucratic self-help, taking up the ‘risk society’ meme promoted by endless sermons on how to manage it under ‘Xi Jinping Thought for the New Era’.
Always look for the negative corollary: that’s our rule of thumb for China policy analysts. A bevy of solutions touted for ‘buck passing in grassroots risk management’ signals pretty reliably that the buck is in fact being passed as if it were going out of style.
Hu Chunyan
is a professor in the Institute of Local Governance, Central South University. She has held a visitorship at the Development Institute of the University of Sussex, UK (yet her Chinese prose is in hypnotic ‘modern eight-legged essay’ style).
How to avoid ‘buck-passing’ in grassroots government risk management1
The PRC is at present in a critical economic and social transformation period. Factors of uncertainty and risk issues have increased sharply. Preventing systemic risk has become an important task of governance. Faced with complex and ever-changing risk, grass-roots governments and grass-roots cadres, saddled with heavy tasks and lacking resources, often resort to buck-passing (‘beating drums and passing flowers’) to avoid their responsibility for governing tough issues of risk, typically resulting in it becoming merely formal and superficial; the governance effect is negligible, and responsibility difficult to carry out. This leads to formalised, ambiguous carriage of risk governance responsibility, with risk potentially subject to secondary amplification. Hence in grassroots risk management, measures such as creating better ‘pressure relief’ systems, bolstering cultivation of cadre governance capabilities, and optimising system design for government accountability should be taken to avoid buck passing.
Build better ‘pressure relief’
Excessive accumulation of risk management pressure in grassroots government is the main reason for resort to buck-passing and related strategies. It is necessary to deal with and eliminate it effectively in grassroots risk management, likewise improving its pressure release mechanism.
Focus on building institutions of pressure return feedback. An important feature of buck-passing is that transmission of task pressure is one-way and irreversible, i.e. the risk governance pressure exerted via tasks or KPIs by higher levels or functional departments can only be transmitted from high levels to the grassroots. The latter cannot provide effective feedback on pressure issues to the former, and it is impossible to promote the return of unreasonable pressure, which will lead to the overload of grass-roots risk management pressure and buck-passing. Hence, higher levels or agencies must build corresponding pressure feedback and return systems.
Higher levels should reduce forms of pressure. In the face of risk issues, they should make scientific decisions with the full use of IT. It is even necessary to make scientific deployments that conform to the capacity and resource status of the grassroots government based on its governance capacity and resource status, rather than simply putting pressure on the grassroots government through formalised activities e.g. mandatory task lists, assessment indicators, or supervision and inspection. In performance assessment above all, higher levels must formulate scientific, reasonable, and appropriate KPIs based on grassroots governments’ actual conditions, maintain distinctions between substantive and formal indicators, and assign more reasonable and substantive assessment tasks, rather than constantly refining formal indicators. The increase and refinement of the number of superficial indicators cannot effectively improve the performance of risk governance. Only by proceeding from the actual situation and determining the assessment indicators according to local conditions can the task pressure released by the superiors have the motivation to stimulate the grassroots innovation governance. avoidance behaviour.
Strengthening the Cultivation of Leading Cadres’ Governance Ability
Risk society examines the government’s ability to govern. Grassroots society is a major point of risk occurrence and governance, and grassroots government’s capacity to govern is related to its risk governance efficacy. To effectively deal with buck-passing in grassroots governments’ risk management, strengthening the cultivation of grassroots leading cadres’ governance capabilities is an inevitable requirement.
Build a platform for leading cadres to communicate with each other. Higher-level governments or functional departments should, based on the status of grassroots governance capabilities, build platforms and channels for counterpart communication for cultivating of grassroots cadres’ governance capabilities. Grassroots governments with weak governance ability will establish a counterpart assistance relationship with those with good risk governance effect and strong governance ability. Improve grassroots leading cadres’ governance ability via counterpart communication and learning interaction, expand governance thinking and improve the ability to lead. Establishing counterpart exchanges and cooperative relations among cadres will help promote intergovernmental cooperation and speed up the forming risk governance communities.
Carry out risk management education. The state of risk prevention and control is at this point serious, yet there remain leading cadres who are inadequately aware of risk, lacking the professional knowledge to respond to it scientifically, resulting in frequent risk management errors. Creating risk governance education mechanisms can hence be considered, incorporating institutionalised risk education into the training content of leading cadres, and can even be used as an incidental KPI. Their awareness of risk can thus be improved, their knowledge of it increased, and their awareness of its prevention and response strengthened.
Speed up school-local cooperation. Major forces in knowledge production and transmission, colleges and universities are great assistants in improving the professional knowledge and capabilities of grass-roots governments, and in forming scientific risk management ideas and strategies. Not only can speeding up cooperation between grassroots governments and local universities make up for the shortcomings of grassroots professional governance, it may also speed up implementing academic research on risk management, and provide a solid scientific knowledge foundation for grassroots cadres to innovate risk management.
Optimise design of accountability systems
The lag developing accountability systems for risk governance is a major reason for buck-passing at the grassroots. Optimising design of accountability systems and promoting the fulfillment of risk governance responsibilities are important ways of eliminating it.
Establish a composite accountability system for risk governance. Due to the uncertainty and complexity of risk, defining responsible subjects in risk governance is a hard ask. On the one hand, the causes of risk are complex, such as public health epidemic risks, ecological and environmental risks, etc. These generally comprise a range of factors. Determining cause, too, is a challenge. So in a risk society, the responsibilities and interests of various subjects, e.g. government, society, and enterprises are intertwined, forming communities of responsibility and interest. Responsibility in risk governance should be more of a composite responsibility subject. Responsibility may be legal, administrative, disciplinary, etc.; the responsibility subject can be a department, or people and organisations in multiple departments.
Promote transition from homogeneous to heterogeneous accountability. In a traditional system, the government plays dual roles of ‘referee’ and ‘competitor’ at one and the same time, resulting in inadequate accountability and equity. Risk responsibility should be defined and evaluated with the help of external forces, e.g. experts in various fields, and high-tech enterprises to enhance scientific, fair and effective government accountability. Buck passing in grassroots government risk management is corrected via effective and accurate accountability.
Help create fault tolerance and correction mechanisms. These have become major mechanisms of protection and relief, promoting cadres’ responsibility and innovation. Buck passing in grassroots governments’ risk management is largely due to cadres’ fear of accountability, and ideas of avoiding accountability induced by situations of high-pressure accountability. Promoting fault-tolerant and error-correcting mechanisms in the field of risk governance provides institutional guarantees for grassroots officials to act boldly, relieving psychological pressure brought by high-pressure accountability, releasing grassroots officials’ governance and innovation vitality, and promoting carrying out responsibilities for risk governance.
Vigorously develop the ‘technology + accountability’ model. Developing and advancing technical means providing the higher levels with powerful tools to precisely locate who has responsibility. Higher levels should actively use emerging technologies, combining big data to scientifically analyse grassroots governments’ allocation of responsibility and ability to exercise it. Formulate appropriate risk response strategies and scientifically deploy risk governance tasks to avoid governance overload and responsibility accumulation. Iterative features of technology also need to be used, combining practical experience and analytical methods, to constantly optimise and improve the accountability system, make it capable of development, and provide support for the grassroots to cultivate sustainable risk governance capabilities.
Hu Chunyan, "Avoiding ‘buck-passing’ in grassroots government risk management ”, Aisixiang, 7 August 2022 [胡春艳:“如何避免基层政府风险治理“击鼓传花”现象”,爱思想,2022年8月 7日 (in Chinese).].