ABSTRACT
How can policy innovations continue to develop and be diffused throughout China? This chapter analyzes the reform of river chief systems (RCS), a type of institutional innovation. The study found that resolving intergovernmental coordination problems drove both institutional innovation and diffusion. The institutional innovation aimed to mitigate the problems of weak functional linkage (PFL) between government departments, by forming working teams, setting up a coordinating agency, and adjusting national policy design. The study identified three diffusion conduits of the river chief system (RCS) reforms: bottom-up diffusion through local innovations, top-down diffusion through pilot schemes, and horizontal diffusion through learning and imitation.
