Huanming Wang

Adaptive water governance plays an increasingly important role in sustainable urban development and water governance response to global climate change. To comprehensively understand the research situation and development trend of adaptive water management, this study conducts a systematic literature review of articles published in International Social Sciences Citation Index (SSCI) journals based on bibliometric analysis. The results show that adaptive water governance as an emerging topic of water governance has an overall growth trend in published articles. The articles on adaptive water governance mainly concentrated on the disciplines of environmental science and environmental studies. Developed countries are a hub for water governance research, and China has the sixth largest number of articles from around the world. The adaptive water governance research has formed a preliminary global collaborative network, but the authors' collaboration needs to be strengthened. The most popular topics of adaptive water governance include South Africa, adaptive management, groundwater, principal component analysis, scenario planning, the analytic hierarchy process, resources, basins, computer experiments, and technology development. This finding suggests that adaptive water governance is a critical driver for sustainable urban development and represents a critical direction in the future research of water governance.

How public policies change incrementally over time remains understudied. This paper contributes to the studies of incremental policy change by integrating the theories of policy layering and learning into a theoretical framework of experimental governance (EG). Using a mixed research method, we apply this framework to process-tracing the changing trajectory of China’s central government infrastructure public-private partnership (PPP) policies from 1988 to 2017 by looking at evolving policy goals, policy measures, and policy co-issuing networks. Results suggest that China’s central government infrastructure PPP policy change follows a refined EG approach in which policies change incrementally in a layering pattern, primarily driven by learning. Findings provide a new account of incremental policy change.

Governance plays a critical role in determining the success and failure of public–private partnerships (PPPs). We conducted a systematic review of case study literature on PPP governance and developed a governance framework consisting of 21 issues in four groups: institutional, organizational, contractual, and managerial. Then, we investigate the dynamics of governance issues, including the relative importance, interrelationships, and connections with PPP success and failure. Results suggest that PPPs should emphasize cooperation, trust, communication, capability, risk allocation and sharing, competition, and transparency in their governance. We also found that the governance practice of emphasizing dominant and direct factors and ignoring recessive and indirect ones has hindered PPPs’ success.

This article investigates the relationship between privatisation and equity, and considers the extent to which measures to reverse privatisation have improved citizens’ access to public services. The Coefficient of Variation (CV) method is used to measure equity, and the multiple regression method is adopted to test the relationship between privatisation and equity. The findings confirm that there is a negative relationship between market access and equity, an inverted U-shape relationship between competition and equity, and a positive relationship between ownership and equity. In addition, the findings demonstrate that privatisation reversal does not have a clear impact on equity. Chinese language abstract available 民营化对公共服务公平性的影响：来自中国的实证 本文调查了公共服务民营化与公平之间的关系，并考虑了逆民营化是否提高了公共服务的可获得性。论文采用了变异系数法（CV）来衡量公共服务公平性，以中国245个城市的公交服务数据为例，使用多元回归来检验民营化与公平之间的关系。研究结果显示公平性与市场可进入性存在显著负相关；公平性与市场竞争存在倒U型关系；公平性与产权存在显著正相关。此外，该研究结果显示逆民营化不意味着公平性的提升。

Since 2008, some of China's municipal governments have reversed the privatization of market‐led reform in the bus transport field. But this reversal is not a return to the direct public monopoly delivery model of the past. Instead the new structure is a hybrid of public control with business delivery. This mixed model attempts to balance government, market and social groups. This mode is a contracting network where government plays a lead role to organize the stakeholders to achieve common goals. This paper uses the Shanghai municipality bus service as a case to illustrate this new mode. It argues that the contract between government and operators and the participation of social groups helps balance the control of the government. This mixed network mode of management reduces information asymmetries and promotes shared goals to ensure a higher quality, more responsive service. While not a mixed firm in the sense found in Europe, this mixed public‐public contracting network in China offers insights into the core challenges mixed firms have emerged to address.