What does governance-driven drought teach us

In recent years, field surveys have often revealed the “last mile” problem: the state invests trillions of yuan in rural areas every year, building large water conservancy facilities, roads connecting villages, rural libraries and agricultural technology service stations, providing farmers with infrastructure and public services. But obstacles in implementation mean that these projects benefiting farmers ultimately struggle to play their role.

On the surface, the “last mile” is an engineering problem. For example, water conservancy facilities are completed, but the small field ditches leading to farmers' plots are not connected, making it difficult for large and medium-sized water conservancy facilities to deliver real results; a rural library is built, but because management is not matched, farmers cannot use it; an agricultural technology service station is set up, but it lacks the motivation and enthusiasm to promote agricultural technology to farmers…… It seems the government only needs to keep investing more money to finish the job, but the facts are not that simple.

This is actually a governance problem, an organizational problem. Take irrigation as an example: even if the state builds excellent water conservancy facilities, coordinating scattered farming households to use them is not easy. This requires sharing water fees and requires farming households to negotiate and form a common will. As long as one household wants to “free ride”, more farming households will follow, leading to the failure of action to use large and medium-sized water conservancy facilities. Some call the drought caused by this phenomenon “governance-driven drought”, to distinguish it from climate-driven drought or engineering-driven drought. Governance-driven drought is not a real drought, nor is it that existing projects cannot pump water to the fields; rather, rural grassroots organizations are weak and ineffective, unable to organize farmers to share water costs and ditch maintenance fees.

⟦NL> Take agricultural technology extension as another example. The future of agriculture lies in science and technology, and the state also attaches great importance to science and technology, but grassroots agricultural technology stations lack a foothold in villages. When agricultural technicians enter a village, if the village collective organization is unwilling to actively cooperate, the technicians cannot carry out field trials and agricultural technology extension. The result is likely to be that no matter how the agricultural technology station is built, it is very difficult to integrate it with the needs of the farming masses.

A deeper dissection of these examples reveals that the reason the “last mile” problem keeps recurring is that policy implementation lacks an organizational fulcrum. To solve the “last mile” problem, it is necessary to strengthen the building of rural grassroots organizations. Only through coordination by grassroots organizations can state policy, in the process of extending downward, find a fulcrum for real implementation; and can farmers' interests, in the process of gathering upward, obtain a vehicle for collective action. As the saying goes, the key to state governance capacity lies not only in the ability to do big things, but also in the ability to do small things. To accomplish small things, strong grassroots organizations are needed.

It can be said that wherever grassroots organizations are sound, pro-farmer policies there can be implemented effectively. For example, when Chengdu was building an experimental zone for urban-rural integration, it established a villager deliberation assembly system. The key was that the government allocated a fixed 200,000-300,000 yuan per year for public goods construction funds, to be deliberated and decided on for use by the villager deliberation assembly. The result in practice was that deciding through the villager deliberation assembly on public funds transferred from above to the village raised villagers' awareness of participation and formed a genuine public will based on villagers' interests. That is to say, as state resources went to the countryside, farmers gained real benefits, and the authority of village collective organizations also rose greatly.

As the wave of urbanization sweeps in, land contractors and land cultivators gradually separate, which will make the interest relationships of decentralized household operations more complex. Under these circumstances, how to strengthen the building of rural grassroots organizations, provide a strong lever for the implementation of state policy, and solve the “last mile” problem of pro-farmer policies is a test of governance capacity and also an opportunity for deepening reform.