Top-down place-based competition and award: local government incentives for non-GDP improvement in China

Top-down place-based competition and award (TDPBCA) has a growing presence in the West and a long existence in China. TDPBCA refers to the motivational strategy in which a higher authority sets a series of targets for lower-level governments to compete against each other or to pass the benchmarks set by the higher authority to become a winner. The participants (unit of assessment) are ‘places’ at the same level of jurisdiction (countries, cities, neighbourhoods, villages). This paper examines TDPBCA as a local motivation policy tool. It first reviews the literature on different local stakeholder motivation strategies and theorises the motivational impact of TDPBCA. The paper then examines the usage of TDPBCA in China and its influence on local stakeholders’ behaviour in terms of public participation, intersectoral collaboration, inter-regional learning and local public spending. The proposed paper examines TDPBC as a local motivation policy tool in China. The first section reviews the literature on different local stakeholder motivation strategies. The second section discusses theoretically the motivational impact of TDPBC. The paper then examines the usage of TDPBC in China and discusses its influence on local stakeholders’ behaviour in terms of public participation, inter-sectoral collaboration, inter-regional learning and local public spending.