China's water reform towards integrated water resources management: current situation and problems

摘要

China has made remarkable progresses on water resources management institutions towards integrated water resources management (IWRM) in laws, policies and administrative systems to solve its highly comprehensive and complicated water problems, which are as follows: 1) legislative foundations of watershed management regime coupled with administrative region management have been founded; 2) environmental and ecological water uses, water demand management and water conservation have been emphasized; and 3) a preliminary national or watershed comprehensive management regime has been established. However, the following problems remain unsolved: 1) much attention is still on centralized or consolidated administrative management which relies on orders and devolution while public participation is still lacking; 2) the three pillars of water institutions, i.e. water law, water policy and water administration, are to some extent inconsistent to each other and lack integrity; and 3) administrative organization reform basically relies on descriptive or diagnostic analysis and a quantitative institutional analysis framework based on modern institutional economics is non-existed. Solutions are proposed to enhance urban or local management under the watershed prerequisite, which means that much incentive should be given to local governments,to improve decentralization and participatory approaches and to alter institutional reform mechanism and found rational and perhaps quantitative institutional analysis framework and methodology.