Water. Development, and indeed life, is impossible without it. Yet delivering clean, accessible water to citizens has and continues to be a vexing challenge for governments worldwide. What explains this, especially in areas of the world where the needs are especially acute? Selina Ho’s Thirsty Cities: Social Contracts and Public Goods Provision in China and India offers a fresh and trenchant explanation for why China is able to provide urban residents “uninterrupted access to drinking water while only a little more than half of Indian urban residents have access to two or three hours of piped water supply per day” (3). Through a masterful comparative study of four cities (Shenzhen, Beijing, New Delhi, and Hyderabad), Ho forcefully argues that any study of public goods provision must go beyond a simple examination of regime type and utilize a more holistic approach, one which recognizes the importance of both formal and informal institutions and places them at the center of analysis.
Ho’s study is multi-faceted and moves smoothly between a critical view of state-society dynamics, national policy shifts, and local-level maneuvering. Like layers of an onion, each section of the book can be pulled back to reveal nuanced insights into how and why these cities reached differing heights of success. In this sense, Ho offers a useful way of not only understanding public goods provision and governance, but also the divergent strategies and outcomes in China and India. Ho’s study skillfully integrates seemingly disparate theoretical approaches and unifies them under the compact and elegant frame of social contracts. Conceptualizing the social contract as a “certain set of ideas, principles, and precepts that guide and inform actions of state actors and ordinary citizens of a country” (7), she argues that these informal, unwritten expectations can and do influence how state officials prioritize key public goods and work to deliver them. In China, for example, citizens expect the government to deliver development and prosperity (especially in urban areas). When coupled with strong state capacity and coordination, the result is sustained access to clean drinking water in Shenzhen and Beijing. By contrast, a strong populist bent in the Indian social contract often collides with socialist welfare promises and pro-growth policies, undercutting the state’s ability to undertake cohesive, effective action to expand clean drinking water access in New Delhi and Hyderabad.
Ho’s analysis drills down even further and highlights the extraordinarily complicated bureaucratic mazes in China and India and underscores the daunting challenge of organizing and synchronizing a plethora of social and political interests to realize the objective of accessible drinking water. In fact, the case studies meticulously detail how municipal authorities enacted a dizzying number of policies and regulations and reorganized agencies to form an effective, viable urban water management network in China. In comparison, Indian authorities were hampered by numerous constraints, including limited state capacity and fragmentation and even the continuing presence of the so-called “water mafia” in New Delhi. These case studies—a tale of two cities twice over!—provide the rich soil from which Ho’s broader insights grow. They also underscore her tremendous grasp of micro-level dynamics and her keen ability to draw out the broader national implications of these developments.
Despite the book’s important findings, some questions nevertheless linger. While Ho makes a persuasive case for the “stickiness” of social contracts, what is less clear is why certain parts of these contracts seem to stick more, better, and longer. In the Chinese case, for example, Ho emphasizes a remarkable consistency in popular expectations of government performance over time: fulfill the historic “mandate of Heaven” or lose legitimacy. Yet countless instances of official malfeasance and periodic anti-corruption campaigns suggest that Chinese officials often struggle to fulfill their end of the contract. Given such variation in performance, one must wonder whether revamped performance incentives and the allure of career advancement (both figure prominently in post-Mao Chinese administration) intersect with, and even play a major role in, reshaping the informal norms that are supposed to guide their actions. By contrast, is it merely India’s fragmented history that explains why populism and patronage politics now seem to overshadow more traditional expectations of those in power? To be sure, there are no easy answers to such questions. To her credit, Ho does acknowledge that social contracts are not eternal: the terms of the agreement can and do change over time. Still, addressing these concerns more precisely (perhaps in a future book) can help shed additional light on how historical legacies, public demands, as well as incentive structures combine to shift developmental trajectories in decisive and consequential ways.
Selina Ho’s Thirsty Cities: Social Contracts and Public Goods Provision in China and India is an outstanding work that will undoubtedly attract the interest and attention of those interested in questions of institutional design and performance, state-society relations, and development in China and India. Advanced undergraduates, graduate students, and scholars alike will want to engage with and think deeply about the vital questions regarding state autonomy, social embeddedness, and accountability that Ho raises. In this regard, this book provides a useful lesson that all state leaders (even those in authoritarian systems) must deliver at least a basic minimum of goods and services to their citizens if they are to ensure the regime’s survival and legitimacy.
Calvin Chen
Mount Holyoke College, South Hadley