Drought management: a multi-level governance approach in rural China

Drought has always been a serious problem in many parts of the world, and climate change may further exacerbate this problem. Much literature is available on providing information on drought instruments in rural China covering establishing national drought relief (Zhang et al., 2005) and water scarcity management systems (Qu et al., 2010), promoting water saving and agricultural technology (Huang et al., 2009; Blanke, et al., 2007), analyzing Water Users Association (WUA) (Wang et al., 2010), initiating water pricing measures (Yang et al., 2003; Zhong and Mol, 2010), popularizing agricultural subsidies (Du et al., 2011), and experimenting with policy-oriented microfinance and agricultural insurance (Du, 2003; Zeng and Mu, 2010). But very few has addressed the issues on multi-level governance in this area in general, and in China in particular. This paper focuses on the question: How can an examination of institutional and non-institutional causes of drought and the performance of existing instruments at multiple levels of governance help us to develop more appropriate policy instruments for drought management in China?