In the midst of complexity, how should governments identify problems, develop solutions, and assess outcomes? Karen Eggleston, John Donahue, and Richard Zeckhauser argue that collaborative governance provides a useful template to harness the comparative advantages of both public- and private-sector actors in terms of productivity, information gathering, legitimacy, and resource management. Focusing on China and the United States, the authors highlight that despite vastly different political contexts, policy makers face similar trade-offs in terms of delegation, monitoring, and risk management. By soberly assessing both the positive and negative aspects of collaborative governance, the book seeks to provide the principal tools to guide policy makers in how to design policies that allow for collaboration between the public and private sectors that can result in greater value than either could do on their own.

The Dragon, the Eagle, and the Private Sector is more a tightly written analytical guide for policy makers than a work of comparative politics, which the authors acknowledge. While ample time is taken to consider the different bureaucratic cultures, subnational relations, and makeup of the public and private sectors in China and the United States, the primary aim of the book is to offer readers a framework of questions to guide collaborative governance regardless of regime type. Comparativists may bristle at the book’s cursory treatment of authoritarian regime dynamics, which acknowledges but does not dwell on the authoritarian’s penchant for secrecy, top-down control, limits on civic engagement, and single-party dominance. But these issues are downplayed for the purposes of advancing a policy makers’ decision tree that considers when public involvement is merited, which mode of delegation (contracting, collaboration, or private volunteerism) is appropriate, whether for-profit or nonprofit entities should be involved, and how institutions should be designed. To avoid the pitfalls of payoff discretion, in which actors siphon public funds for private benefit, or preference discretion, in which the narrow interests of a group are favored over those of the broader population, the authors demonstrate the importance of instituting measures that facilitate transparency. They present detailed analyses of public-private arrangements in railway management, housing, education, national event management, and healthcare, to which their framework is applied to show where collaborative governance has been net positive or how pitfalls could have been avoided. These chapters are rich and draw together a host of literature with a clear analytical lens.

As is the case with most work that leans on the similarities of a political process between countries, variation is not treated in a systematic fashion in the empirical chapters. The authors do not present the United States and China as modeling different types of collaborative governance with recurring patterns of profit-sharing, personnel management, and interjurisdictional conflict that occur across sectors. Comparativists, with our penchant for viewing countries or regions as empirical manifestations of an ideal type, will certainly be left wanting more. The authors raise many important differences, but leave macropattern matching to the reader: That China’s moves toward collaborative governance starts with a public-sector bias and the United States’ with a private-sector bias is not further explored; policy making in a fragmented authoritarian regime and a federal system is recognized but a systematic consideration of trade-offs is left to the conclusion; and discussions of China’s visible hand in the economy are raised throughout, but how this shapes a broader pattern of collaboration that is evident across policy spheres is not covered. Perhaps most perplexing is the description of nonstate actors in China (State-Owned Enterprises (SOE), corporatized SOEs, public organizations, and foreign joint ventures), as functional equivalents to the American private sector. Again, the authors take great pains to highlight these differences only to suggest that in practice they are quite similar. The US preference to collaborate with private, nonprofits is described as paralleling China’s collaborative schemes with corporatized SOEs. But scholarship has shown corporatized SOEs remain deeply entrenched in the networks of the Party State, overseen by SASAC, accountable to various planning commissions, and institutions whose personnel appointments are managed by the Party’s organization department. While the circulation of state-held shares of SOEs has been made possible since 2005, various agencies have been loath to off-load their stakes into the secondary market because it could compromise state control.

However, it is this commitment to assessing the striking similarities in collaborative governance across China and the United States that also makes this book distinctive. A critique of both the American politics and Chinese politics literatures is the underlying tendency to view their respective political dynamics as sui generis. Yet Eggleston, Donahue, and Zeckhauser convincingly show that in terms of the policy maker’s analysis of policy problems, assignment of responsibilities to collaborators, design of incentives, and assessment of outcomes, China and the United States employ a similar calculus, and face all too familiar pitfalls: China’s struggle to address payoff discretion in minban schools parallels problems in the United States with for-profit universities; both countries’ massive vaccine development programs in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic exemplify the promising potential of collaborative governance in research and development; and Business Improve Districts in the US real estate market resemble place-targeted inducements in China. It is important to remember that any study employing a Most-Different Systems Design will always invite critiques centering on variation, and at the very least, the Dragon, the Eagle, and the Private Sector will generate ample discussion exploring the institutional differences of collaborative governance in each country.

My primary concern with the book is that it seems written for a different moment in China’s policymaking evolution—a time before Xi Jinping took the helm of the Party State. Indeed, most of the authors’ observations on the collaborative schemes between state and nonstate actors sit well with the vast literature on policy experimentation in China, most notably scholarship by Sebastian Heilmann, and on state reliance on civil society organizations for the distribution of social goods (as captured by Jessica Teets, who is cited throughout the manuscript), and work on endogenous institutional adaptation, as described by Kellee Tsai. Since the 1990s, despite frequent waves of centralization and decentralization, one observes that both the central and local state have engaged with nonstate actors in policy development, public goods provision, and regulatory management. One could easily extend the authors’ analysis to environmental protection, agricultural production, food safety, financial management, and aviation.

Under Xi Jinping, however, policy makers have moved swiftly toward a model of top-level design in which central actors have centralized power at the expense of nonstate actors. One observes increased limits to policy innovation, curtailment of private industry, and squeezing of civil society. Party leading small groups have been established at every level of the state hierarchy, imposing policy uniformity from the top down. Corporations both state-owned and private have been subject to increased oversight by the Party, with new Party committees being established even in foreign enterprises. Such changes increasingly render the distinction between state-owned and private corporations less analytically useful, giving rise to the term “state-adjacent” to characterize state-business relations. Most troubling has been the Party State’s recent crackdown on major technology giants, which have played a crucial role in collaborative schemes in finance, public transport management, and education. These changes are particularly relevant to the book because its conceptualization of collaborative governance rests on a notion of shared discretion between public and private actors. As a hierarchical mode of control is imposed throughout the system, collaborative governance schemes are increasingly on tenuous ground.

The Dragon, the Eagle, and the Private Sector is cautiously optimistic that collaborative governance will take hold as China’s civil society matures, its private sector grows, and its leadership embraces the market. Whether or not one agrees with this view, the authors present a powerful toolkit for policy makers to better design collaborative schemes to create public value. Policy makers and scholars both inside and outside China alike will benefit from a close reading of this insightful book.