LAUSR

Singapore shares with China a performance-based social contract, whereas Venezuela and Brazil possess social contracts similar to the populist-socialist form found in India. The notable exception for China is the Maoist social contract, which was predicated on ideology and ideological commitment over performance—but this was the exception that proves the rule to the broader pattern of a performance-based social contract informing state– society relations in China. In the concluding chapter the author also addresses the potential claim of “cultural determinism” by offering some conditions under which social contracts might change, though as she acknowledges, change occurs only very gradually (through the slow evolution of norms) or rarely (via exogenous shocks or historical ruptures). One of the risks in using the term “social contract” to refer to underlying norms associated with the expectations of government by the governed is the term’s close association with Western political theorists writing in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries about the origins and limitations of sovereign power. Ho discusses briefly the ideas of Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau, but chooses not to give a close reading to the much-earlier classical governance texts found in Chinese and Indian discussions of statecraft. She does note that in China, most rulers have sought to protect the population from the direst forms of deprivation and disaster, such as famine and floods. Failure to provide relief from these crises offers legitimate grounds for popular rebellion, as Mencius intoned. But even in this most explicit of formulations in which rebellion is justified against the sovereign, there was no agreement based on mutual consent between state and society, as implied in most conceptions (and in Ho’s own definition) of social contracts. The more interesting puzzle is not, as posed in chapter 1, why authoritarian rulers in China do better at the public provision of water than democratically accountable rulers in India, but rather why Chinese officials so willingly adopted private sector participation in water projects and utilities while in India similar proposals provoked widespread opposition. Public–private partnerships (PPPs) were widely accepted in China, which in 2012 accounted for 14 of 15 total water sector PPPs in East Asia (p. 123). The case studies of the four cities trace the opposition to PPPs in water utilities in New Delhi and Hyderabad, and the relative success in injecting foreign and domestic capital into state-run water utilities in Shenzhen and Beijing. The fact that municipal authorities in China have far greater fiscal autonomy and responsibilities compared to their Indian counterparts is noted frequently throughout the chapters, and it constitutes a potential rival explanation for water provision. Building infrastructure increases officials’ chances for promotion within the Chinese Communist Party and government hierarchies. This intra-party norm has helped spur China’s growthand infrastructure-led development. By sharp contrast, urban officials in India (elected or otherwise) face rigid constraints in raising local revenues and shouldering expenditures, leaving state-level legislatures and administrative agencies to balance urban public goods provision with demands from rural sectors. The social contract concept may shed light on why some authoritarian regimes provide high levels of public services while other autocracies fail to do so (and why some democracies might outperform others in public goods provision). Yet it is worth noting that Chinese citizens pay a high price for the provision of water and other public services, including world-class infrastructure projects—in the form of pollution, corruption, escalating public debt, curbs on individual freedoms, and few viable channels to challenge authorities when public services are not provided or when infrastructure fails. Nonetheless, Thirsty Cities offers a bold approach for understanding how differences in public service provision may arise from variation in informal institutions that connect state and society and less so from formal institutions that are more commonly the focus in comparative studies of public policy.