Public scrutiny is not a mechanism often associated with authoritarian states, whose obfuscatory and unaccountable systems of governance enable officials to act with impunity, beyond the purview of the public. Yet it is now well known that complex authoritarian bureaucracies have recognized the need to address citizen dissatisfaction, not least in order to prevent spill-over into popular contention that could threaten regime stability. Iza Ding's enthralling monograph goes beyond this insight to explain how China's over-stretched and under-resourced environmental protection agencies attempt to assuage a disgruntled citizenry: they engage in performative governance.
Ding defines performative governance as what happens when the state bureaucracy “lacks the logistical capacity and political clout to deliver good governance outcomes, but is pressured to appear responsive to appease public opinion” (p. 35). Mapping the conditions that might lead street-level government officials to rely on this labour-intensive yet seemingly futile activity, she elaborates a typology that predicts four types of public sector behaviour when varying degrees of state capacity and public scrutiny are in place. First, the state bureaucracy is “inert” when both capacity and scrutiny are absent; second, it is “paternalistic” when capacity is high but there is little scrutiny; third, it is “substantive” when both capacity and scrutiny are in abundance. The focus of the book is on the fourth type: “performative governance,” which bureaucrats engage in when the state's “logistical ability and political capacity” for effective policy implementation is low but there is widespread public interest in that policy sphere (p. 25).
Of course, distinguishing performance from substance comes with a particular set of methodological challenges, namely that “these two conceptually distinct phenomena may prove observationally equivalent on the front stage” (p. 10). Ding details how, only after several months of participant observation within the Environmental Protection Bureau (EPB) of the anonymized southern Chinese city of “Lakeville,” she concluded that the intensive monitoring activities she had witnessed were not substantively improving local air quality but were in fact having very little tangible effect (p. 87). This finding reaffirms the enormous value of ethnographic fieldwork; without Ding's long-term placement as a worker inside an EPB, the performative aspect of its environmental governance would have remained hidden.
Does performative governance have any effect on citizens' views? In the book's penultimate chapter, Ding presents the results of two surveys, which indicate that citizens are concerned about pollution levels and place responsibility for this on their local public authority (p. 115). She also presents a regression analysis to explain the relationship between coverage of performative governance in online media and citizens’ approval of their local environment agency, finding that performative governance does have a somewhat positive impact on citizens’ views (p. 124). It is therefore entirely rational that officials expend their energies on this activity, in the absence of sufficient resources for substantive governance.
In the book's final chapter, the concept is applied more widely, with brief investigations into a water pollution crisis in Flint, Colorado, the outbreak of COVID-19 in Wuhan and coastal pollution in Ha Tinh, Vietnam. In all three cases, performative governance broke down when further information came to light, exposing local officials’ ineffectual approach to solving the problem. This certainly whets the appetite for a more systematic comparative study (indeed, one wonders, given the understandable lack of fieldwork underpinning these cases, whether this was performative governance in the sense detailed so persuasively in earlier chapters). An interesting case to consider, in the eyes of this reviewer, would be Russian environmental governance – arguably characterized by lower levels of state capacity and higher levels of public scrutiny, due to its somewhat less restrictive media environment. In Russia, independent public scrutiny is largely associated with “foreign agents,” consequently delegitimized, and replaced with avenues for manufactured public scrutiny (an eventuality that Ding accounts for on p. 33). Indeed, for performative governance to exist, officials must surely have a certain regard for citizens’ views in the first place.
Ding's concept of performative governance is particularly refreshing since it departs from familiar debates around democracy and authoritarianism by presenting a model of state–society relations not centred on electoral participation. In developing an alternative dyad for comparative analysis, Ding's framework suggests that all states that lack the resources to implement much-needed policies may engage in performative governance, regardless of their political regimes – although, as Ding suggests, citizens in democracies may be more likely to expose performative governance thanks to a freer media environment (p. 152). Nevertheless, one wonders whether, in this period of post-pandemic austerity, we may see more performative governance around the world as struggling government departments attempt to appease clamorous citizens.
In sum, this is a brilliantly written book, which combines perceptively observed vignettes of the routine lives of street-level bureaucrats and citizens with thought-provoking theoretical assertions and debates in order to expose the gap between what China's bureaucrats say they do and what they actually do. It will be of great interest to a wide range of students and researchers. On an empirical level, its sweeping depiction of the evolution of environmental governance in China will be valuable to students of China's green politics. On a theoretical level, its story of imperfect policy implementation and its concept of performative governance will be of great relevance to researchers in comparative politics and public administration more broadly.
