Water governance faces growing challenges from climate change, pollution, and increasing demand, rendering policy evolution a critical research focus. This study analyzes the evolutionary characteristics of China’s national water resources governance policies from 1988 to 2025 through an integrated quantitative textual analysis. Based on 154 authoritative policy documents, the study employs Latent Dirichlet Allocation topic modeling, semantic network analysis, and a tripartite policy instrument coding scheme (command-and-control, market-based, and public participation instruments). The results reveal three key findings: a significant shift in policy attention from early administrative control toward system-oriented governance emphasizing watershed/ecological protection, conservation, and technology; a persistently imbalanced instrument mix with command-and-control tools remaining dominant, despite gradual diversification after 2000; and a three-stage evolutionary trajectory from administrative framework building (1988–1999), through comprehensive management and diversification (2000–2015), to collaborative innovation and basin/ecology integration (2016–2025). This study contributes a long-term empirical perspective on water policy evolution in an emerging economy, demonstrates an integrated textual-analytic approach, and provides actionable insights for optimizing policy mixes through strengthened incentive compatibility, substantive participation mechanisms, and coherent governance-aligned instrument portfolios.
Wu et al. (Fri,) studied this question.