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AbstractThe 'vulnerability' approach highlights institutional factors as the primary drivers of flooding risk. However, the intricate connections between institutional vulnerability and urban flood disaster risk have not been extensively explored until now. This study aims to address this gap by examining the case of the 7·20 heavy rainfall disaster in Zhengzhou. Employing a hybrid analysis methodology that integrates text coding, fault tree analysis and analytic hierarchy process methods, the study seeks to identify and assess the distinct contributions of various institutional factors and their interplay, culminating in ineffective urban flood risk management. In contrast to previous research findings that emphasize the determinant role of policy‐making and organizational coordination, this study demonstrates that inadequate legislative compliance constitutes the root cause determining the ineffectiveness of urban flood risk management. It is further exacerbated by insufficient policy attention, resulting in inadequate allocation of resources that ensure the legislative quality, risk coping skills and knowledge and stakeholders' coordination and collaboration. By emphasizing the significance of legislative compliance and policy attention, the study offers a fresh conceptual perspective to understand the factors influencing the efficiency of urban flood risk management. It provides valuable insights to develop targeted countermeasures for mitigating similar urban flood risks in the future.

China has long been considered a centralized country. Over the last 30 years, several reforms have gradually transferred important powers to local levels, particularly counties. The article analyzes this evolution based on a field study in two provinces, Zhejiang and Sichuan. The hypothesis is that the transfer of initiatives has become a new way of 'steering' counties' identities in China. This article is based on an analysis from two perspectives. The first is an institutional perspective concerning financial, administrative, and political reform in China; the second is a neo-institutional perspective that examines counties' identities and the role county-level actors play in territorial development and intergovernmental relations within their provinces.

Implementing demolition and transformation policies in urban villages is essential for effective urban governance. However, these villages possess distinctive governance models and entities that set them apart from general urban and rural communities. This study examines the autonomous "informal governance" process in Guangzhou's Yuancun urban village through a case study approach. It investigates the formation mechanisms of the "dual system". The study underlines the significance of grassroots innovation and the Chinese Communist Party's role in attaining governance autonomy. Despite the government's aim to integrate urban villages into the urban governance system, persistent challenges arise from these unique models and entities. The Village Company plays a pivotal role in promoting stable governance through participatory practices and economic advantages. Resolving the complex issues in urban villages necessitates integrated economic, political, and social solutions. Empowering the Village Company to handle specific public affairs can facilitate the transition towards the modernization of grassroots governance.

Policy capacity is described as a determinant for effective policy implementation. Its contents vary according to modes of governance. Based on available academic studies, grey literature, and semi-structured interviews, this study empirically explores how urban village redevelopment has been carried out in two cities, Hangzhou and Guangzhou, through the lens of policy capacity. By contrasting policy outcomes and the manifestation of policy capacity at different levels in these two cities, we develop three arguments that contribute to our understanding of urban renewal and policy capacity. Firstly, the performance of any policy action is affected by the capacity of the central actor to develop and implement policies. Secondly, understanding the interactive logical between analytical, operational, and political capacities under different governance modes is the key to understanding the strengths and weaknesses of policy capacity in a specific sector. Shaped by local contexts and past experience, local governments are predisposed to path dependence in developing and deploying policy capacity in urban village redevelopment. Thirdly, the capabilities and resources needed to support policies are largely determined by policy problematization at the analytical level: the technique-based approach of policy capacity theory needs to complete the missing link between policy framing and ethical issues.

BACKGROUND: After the lockdown of Wuhan on January 23, 2020, the government used community-based pandemic prevention and control as the core strategy to fight the pandemic, and explored a set of standardized community pandemic prevention measures that were uniformly implemented throughout the city. One month later, the city announced its first lists of "high-risk" communities and COVID-19-free communities. Under the standardized measures of pandemic prevention and mitigation, why some communities showed a high degree of resilience and effectively avoided escalation, while the situation spun out of control in other communities? This study investigated: 1) key factors that affect the effective response of urban communities to the pandemic, and 2) types of COVID-19 susceptible communities. METHODS: This study employs the crisp-set qualitative comparative analysis method to explore the influencing variables and possible causal condition combination paths that affect community resilience during the pandemic outbreak. Relying on extreme-case approach, 26 high-risk communities and 14 COVID-19 free communities were selected as empirical research subjects from the lists announced by Wuhan government. The community resilience assessment framework that evaluates the communities' capacity on pandemic prevention and mitigation covers four dimensions, namely spatial resilience, capital resilience, social resilience, and governance resilience, each dimension is measured by one to three variables. RESULTS: The results of measuring the necessity of 7 single-condition variables found that the consistency index of "whether the physical structure of the community is favorable to virus transmission" reached 0.9, which constitutes a necessary condition for COVID-19 susceptible communities. By analyzing the seven condition configurations with high row coverage and unique coverage in the obtained complex solutions and intermediate solutions, we found that outbreaks are most likely to occur in communities populated by disadvantaged ...