David Austin: Thirsty Cities: Social Contracts and Public Goods Provision in China and India is a book written with one overarching, broad puzzle in mind: While most studies show that democracies produce more public goods than authoritarian ones, why does authoritarian China produce more public goods than democratic India? The book's author is Selina Ho, Assistant Professor at the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy. She specialises in Chinese politics and foreign policy, with a focus on the politics of water and infrastructure. I asked her why she decided to write this book.
Selina Ho: I'm born and raised as a Singaporean. I have two particular interests - one is in water issues and the other is of course, China. Water being an issue that's very close to the heart of a Singaporean. Singapore being a land scarce city, we have a lot of rainfall, but not enough land to catch the rainfall. So, we are water scarce in a sense. So, water is an issue that almost every Singaporean growing up, is very sensitive to.
And since young I've always been fascinated with China, China is our largest neighbour, is the hegemon in Asia. It's actually known as the water hegemon in Asia, in a sense most of the most important rivers flowing through Asia actually comes from Tibet, in China. So, when I wrote this book, I'm really interested in combining both.
But as I was reading it and I was thinking that, you know, India is also one of the largest neighbours and India is a very, very interesting and fascinating country. I thought that, you know, why don't I compare public goods provision in specifically the urban water sector? Meaning the drinking water provision in the city areas, as [a] comparison between the two, and try to explain why China is able to produce more public goods than India.
David Austin: Just describe the differences in service, how much better or worse the delivery of water to these urban areas is?
Selina Ho: In the big cities, even in places like Delhi and Hyderabad, both cities don't have 24/7 tap water.
Middle class folks generally end up acquiring storage systems and filtration systems for their own home. But if you turn on the tap, it's not 24/7, usually it's about two to three hours a day. That's all the amount of water they get from the taps. So, a lot of the middle class folks would store water, filtrate them and clean them themselves.
But the poor ones will have to go through the water stands [at] the water pumps and try and pump water. And the other solution is to wait for the "water mafia". Now, the water mafia are those guys who actually come in big tanks, big water tanks to sell water. And the people who actually get to buy these water - because they're priced pretty high - [are] commercial places like hotels and also the rich and the middle class.
So, depriving the poor of having access to clean water again, right? The water mafia phenomenon is very interesting. It started off as the public utilities providing these water tanks, but it became privatised over time, meaning that a "mafia" actually formed, controlling sources of this water.
And they do things like the siphoning of water from public pipelines, so this is what happens in places like Delhi and Hyderabad and a lot of the big cities in India.
Now in China, obviously, tier one cities for sure, Beijing and Shenzhen, when you turn on the tap, the water is clean and filtrated.
People boil water out of habit, more than anything else. You can see very clearly that they are able to produce a high level of water piped into households, and this water is usually okay in terms of quality.
David Austin: What is the common perception that people have about regimes and the provision of public goods?
Selina Ho:One of the most common and conventional wisdom is that, regime types matter. And I think that regime types do matter, but, they do only matter to a certain extent. So, what do these studies say? They are actually large scale studies of democracies and authoritarian systems.
And some of these studies tend to show that democracies produce higher levels of public goods. And the reasoning behind this is that democracies need to win elections. So, in other words, they need to appeal to the larger citizenship. But authoritarian governments are usually seen as those who are only interested in keeping a small group in place in power.
But there are problems with this kind of explanations. Because there are democracies that do not produce a high level of public goods.
Countries like in Latin America and India are democracies, which actually produce a low level of public goods.
And then you have authoritarian systems like the monarchies, in Gulf States, the Gulf monarchies, they actually have a very high level of public goods provision.
So, the question is why? I mean, these countries are examples which contradict all these large scale studies that look at, you know, just democracies and the authoritarian systems, to say that democracies produce more public goods than authoritarian systems, and that is not entirely true.
And there are always all these other explanations as well which is that, in particular for China and India, the argument has been about China being wealthier, that you have higher level of public goods as a result of high level economic development, and higher state capacity as well.
But this is not essentially true in the sense that higher level of GDP growth can lead to higher levels of income inequalities at the same time, meaning that the ability to redistribute -public goods is about redistribution - can be very low.
High level of GDP does not mean equally good, high level of redistribution, and also elites may decide to accumulate some of this wealth for themselves rather than to redistribute, right? So it's not a determining factor, the level of economic growth.
And the other one is state capacity.
State capacity is not just about the ability to redistribute, but it's also the ability to extract resources from society, like things like taxes. Now in Africa, you have all these predatory states that have high extractive capacities, so you can say that they have high state capacity, especially in area of extraction, but obviously they don't have high levels of public goods.
So, all these statements suggest that some of these existing explanations, conventional wisdoms are flawed.
David Austin: What explanation did you come up with after examining it?
Selina Ho: So, when I look at all these explanations, the focus is on material things, right? Like political systems, economic power, wealth, but how about things that are non-material that could be equally, if not more important, such as norms and values, ethics and morality?
Because governance is not just about material power or capability. Governance is also driven by an underlying set of values, norms, and principles. So, I thought we should go back to the basics. What is the role of leaders, right? What are they concerned about? What do people expect from the government?
There are two things here. It is about the legitimacy of a government. If you want to stay in power, you have to be legitimate. What do you need to do to have legitimacy? And what is it that people expect from their government?
So, when you look at these two, these two things, legitimacy of a government and the expectations from the people you actually have what is essentially a social contract. That forms the twin elements of a social contract. And nowadays we have, people talking about social contracts, especially what's happening in the world today. All the troubles, that, that are around the world.
And people are saying that the social contract is broken. That a social contract between the government and the people is weakened and broken and we need a social contract, right? But what actually is a social contract? And how does it work? I don't think anybody has tried to define it or try to understand this relationship.
Right. In trying to answer this question, why does authority in China produce more public goods than democratic India? I said, let's look at how a social contract actually functions. How does it work? So, this is what the book is about, is about how does a social contract work, and I use China and India as comparisons for this to happen.
David Austin: And then how do you describe each of their social contracts that they have? And what's the difference between them?
Selina Ho:So, let me just start by saying what is a social contract first. I defined it as a set of relationship between the state and society, in which the legitimacy of the government corresponds with the expectations of the people and these usually align.
That's what the traditional political philosophers, people like Locke, Rousseau, Hobbes, that talk about social context.
Right. But I went more, I went beyond that. I talk about the social contract being an informal institution. What is an informal institution? Informal institution it is not explicit. It's usually not written or binding, but [it] behaves as an institution in a sense that if you do not abide by the rules, by the institutions, then there is a chance that you might actually be thrown out of power. You might either through, you know, losing elections, or, you may be purged or overthrown in some other more violent ways. So, in other words, social contract acts as an informal institution because it constrains and enables governments to be able to accomplish certain tasks.
So, what is the difference then between the Chinese and Indian social contracts? The Chinese contract is what I would call the performance -based one, not just in the material sense, but also in the normative sense. There's the idea of the "mandate of heaven". [The] mandate of heaven is rooted in China's imperial history, but it is still relevant today, because we can see it.
Whenever there is a big earthquake, for example the Sichuan earthquake, or going further back, the Tangshan earthquake in 1970s, people will say, 'Oh, the CCP has lost. The Chinese Communist Party has lost the mandate of heaven.'
And we know that the government still cares about the mandate of heaven, you know, the normative part of what they are supposed to do. Chinese officials are traditionally, and even now regard it as, playing a very critical role in providing for the welfare of the people, providing for the wellbeing of the people.
Hence the focus on things like anti-corruption. That has been a consistent theme throughout and the delivery of public goods to look after the wellbeing of the people. So that is a social contract that leads to creations of strong and independent institutions for the provision of public goods. And we see this in examples in my book in the urban water sector, in the cities, both provision of drinking water to residents.
In the case of the Indian social contract, I described it as a socialist and populist social contract. Socialist because it started from Nehru in that sense. Nehru was a socialist. He believed in socialism and he tried to institute that when India became independent. And what is socialism? Essentially it focuses on a central planning and a nationalisation of vital industries.
But another one is that they're supposed to provide for the welfare, social welfare, but social welfare is really hard to come about and, in that sense, they kind of failed in the social welfare part. But the nationalisation of vital industries they actually succeeded. To the extent that when India tried to liberalise in the 1990s, they were very slow. Private sector participation is something that they are very reluctant to embrace even to this day.
Now, the other part of the Indian social contract is populism. Why is it that I say populism and not democracy? Well, India is the largest democracy in the whole world. But it is a form of democracy where universal suffrage actually came about before there was industrialisation. Now, when that happens a universal suffrage meaning that everyone gets to vote.
So, what happens is that society has not developed to the extent where, you know, that [it] is an industrial society. So, the traditional patronage networks exist in the countryside, in the rural areas, all were floated up from each level elections right up to the national level.
So, the traditional patronage system is brought into the national level, as a result of which you see a lot of populism, and this traditional patronage where politicians appeal to the voters promising free water, free electricity.
All these means that institutions that provide public goods in India has become circumscribed. You can't really be producing for the general citizenship when you are providing for your own networks and your own groups, right? So, as a result of the social contract in India, institutions in India is weak in responding to the needs for public goods.
David Austin: Can social contracts like these change over time? Can they be changed? And you know, how does that understanding, how can that be used by policy makers?
Selina Ho: As I was writing this book, I became very troubled because I don't want to think that, you know, social contracts, once it's set and cast in stone means that you can't change and therefore people and countries are doomed to a certain path.
In a sense that's cultural determinism and there's something wrong with that kind of idea. So, when I look into the literature on institutional change, how can institutions change, a few things jumped up. One is that they can change but very slowly and with time. And the other condition is that you need leaders with really good skills and the political will to suffer some costs to themselves and to their political system in order to change the social contract.
And the third condition is that social contracts must fit the context of the country. It cannot be a set of values or systems, norms that do not fit into the context of the country. So, it can change. And when politicians and policymakers know this, they need to be mindful of this agreement that you have with the people.
And if you want to have a higher level of public goods to improve the lives of people, then you need to do certain things. Essentially. I think they are about three or four things that you need to do. First, governments nowadays need to understand what it is that people really want.
How have people's expectations changed, right? The problems of globalisation and the problems that come with income inequalities, what do people actually want from their government now? Is it more the same or have all these expectations changed? So, governments need to understand accurately what it is that their people want.
Number two, they have to ask themselves: How do I fulfil this expectation so that I remain as relevant and legitimate? But also, more importantly, how do I fulfill my moral duty as a leader of a country? Governance is really not just about material things, but it's also about having a moral duty.
And the third point is that sometimes the government needs to suffer some costs, if you really want to improve the lives of the people. And if that's what people mostly want, I would imagine, right? You must have the political will to adjust the social contract. Let me give you the example of India.
A lot of the politicians in my case studies - in the book, I have four case studies - two of them in China, Beijing and Shenzhen, and two of them in India, Hyderabad and Delhi. Now in the periods that I studied these four cities, in Delhi and Hyderabad, you have all these key state leaders, Sheila Dikshit and Chandrababu Naidu.
Both of them through various means, tried to carry out economic reforms to improve the lives of the people, but some of these reforms are very controversial. It means that you cannot do things like free water, free electricity, which is what a lot of Indian politicians promised during electoral times.
And so you need actually the political will to adjust the social contract, and these two actually suffered costs in the end. Sometimes you have to roll back their policies and they were eventually thrown out power. But what I'm saying is that there are costs to it and there must be political will, or you must frame the narratives. Framing the government, framing the narratives is important. Understanding that strong institutions are important as well as having a strong society. So strong state, strong society, that would help to ensure public goods provision.
David Austin: Do you foresee the provision of public goods and particularly water improving in India at all? Do you have any reason to be optimistic?
Selina Ho: No. So, it's really, if India continues on this track right now and with COVID-19, I think the situation is really bad. I was hopeful that when Modi came into power, that he would do things that would benefit India as a whole, because he did really well in governing his home state in Gujarat.
But the steps that Modi had taken trying to transform the economy, actually ended up giving a lot of hardships to the people. There were not significant improvements in public goods provision.
He was populist. He used religion, for a lot of his purposes. I don't see any substantial improvement in the way that he dealt with public goods, you know. Let me give you some examples, right? On the nationwide level, the performance of the water sector actually deteriorated through the years.
So, they are very far away from meeting, what is known as the government of India water service level benchmarks. It's really extremely difficult for them. I think you need to have really good leaders in India who are willing to give up on the populist route and to clearly focus on the social welfare part of their social contract.
Read an excerpt from Thirsty Cities: Social contracts and public goods provision in China and India by Assistant Professor Selina Ho.
(Photo: Yogendra Singh)