Despite the various water management explorations in China over the past three decades, China’s water problems remain challenging. Recently the Chinese government introduced the river chief system, a collaborative water governance approach, as an update to the previous water management system. We analyze this reform by establishing an analytical framework based on collaborative governance theory. The analysis argues that the institutional context and motivations are the external conditions influencing the collaborative governance regime and thus the outcomes of the river chief system. We conclude that the system provides effective water management tackling collaborative issues in the Chinese context, but its long-term effects and sustainability remain to be determined.

Water scholars and practitioners generally agree that improving water governance is the key to addressing water insecurity in developing countries. We review the literature on water governance and argue for a second-generation research agenda, which pays more attention to the study of incentive structures, is multi and inter-disciplinary in orientation and with clear policy implications. We then illustrate how theories drawn from public economics, new institutional economics, political economy and public administration can help diagnose the challenges of integrated water resources management, improving efficiency of water utilities, privatization of utilities and public-private partnerships, water pricing reforms, virtual waters/water trading, among others. We conclude that these tools can help advance the second-generation research agenda on water governance.

The diseconomies of scale found in smallholders’ agricultural production is a common problem faced by global agricultural development. Notable examples of regions in which this occurs include Central and Eastern Europe, India, Brazil, and China. Smallholders usually differ in their demands for socialized agricultural services due to scattered farmland, various soil conditions, different selections of crop varieties, and diverse farming arrangements. Such differences make it difficult for smallholders to cooperate on farmland scale management, resulting in a collective action dilemma. Based on the Institutional Analysis and Development framework, this paper provides insights into the influencing factors and effects of smallholders’ utilization of socialized agricultural services and constructs a cooperative mechanism for the purpose of solving the collective action dilemma in rural areas of China. We found that household characteristics, biophysical conditions, attributes of community, and rules-in-use jointly generate the action situation in the process of smallholders’ cooperative utilization of agricultural socialized services. Among them, the rules-in-use not only have a direct impact on the action situation but also regulate the role of the other three sets of factors. Various factors and mechanisms affecting the cooperative utilization of socialized agricultural services by smallholders interact in the action arena and finally form relevant outcomes that can deal with the diseconomies of farmland fragmentation. These outcomes will be fed back to each external variable again along the feedback path, so as to promote the system and create a virtuous circle. This study provides a theoretical contribution to understanding smallholders’ cooperation in the process of agricultural large-scale operation, especially in regions and countries with a large number of smallholders.

Water user associations (WUAs) are commonly considered a beneficial institution to improve irrigation management. As one of the core components of irrigation reform in China, the number of WUAs has increased from a few in 1995 to nearly 100,000 today. This study examines the performance of irrigation management between villages with WUAs and villages without WUAs, with a set of 15,566 households collected in 941 randomly selected villages from 22 provinces in China. It finds that WUAs do not show overall superiority in almost all aspects in terms of improving irrigation management performance compared with traditional management institutions. Using the institutional analysis and development framework, it further demonstrates the diverse factors that jointly contribute to irrigation management performance, among which the WUAs play small role. The unsatisfactory performance of WUAs may be attributed to the absence of the conditions to support the WUAs functioning in China's centralized political system. To activate the WUAs, policies are recommended such as organizing WUAs based on hydrologic boundary, declining the overlap between the leadership of WUAs and that of the villages, endowing the WUA with more autonomy, and encouraging farmers to participate in the decision‐making process. A broader implication of this study is that there are diverse policy options to address water management challenges, which can be selected according to the specific condition. Achieving the congruence between institutional design and local context holds the key for sustainable water management.

The present paper reviews the literature on urban water demand management and compares practices in South-East Asia. Existing literature is mostly from developed economies and is concerned mainly with elasticity studies, which are not relevant to developing countries because their main problem is non-revenue water. Cities in South-East Asia employ both price and non-price mechanisms to regulate demand. Price mechanisms include increasing block tariffs, fixed, volumetric, raw water, and conservancy charges, rebates, cross-subsidies and periodic rebasing. Non-price mechanisms such as management, engineering and regulatory mechanisms, as well as public education and community involvement, play important roles. More studies are needed to establish their efficacy and cost-effectiveness.