FOUR MODES OF NEIGHBOURHOOD GOVERNANCE
 : The View from Nanjing, China

In a context of global moves towards decentralization and neighbourhood governance, this article focuses on neighbourhood governance in Nanjing, China. We draw on interviews and observations in 32 neighbourhoods to examine how neighbourhood governance plays out in different neighbourhoods. We identify and describe four modes of governance––collective consumption, service privatization, civic provision and statesponsored––to argue that neighbourhood governance develops on the ground in diverse and complex ways, necessitating scholars to be cautious when seeking to generalize about it at the scale of the city, let alone that of the nation-state or the globe. We argue that relationships between actors are important units of analysis when considering how effective governance is achieved in different neighbourhoods; diversity and complexity in neighbourhood governance partly reflect the role of the state in these relationships. In turn the role of the state partly reflects processes of policy evolution in particular neighbourhoods. Introduction Across the world, over the past three decades, there have been moves towards decentralization and neighbourhood governance. The reasons for this ‘global drive’ towards decentralization have been varied (Ezcurra and Rodríguez-Pose, 2013). A ‘revisionist liberalism’ sees a need to supplement market deregulation with ‘good governance’ (Mohan and Stokke, 2000), including ‘sound institutions’ at the national, regional and local scales (Hafteck, 2003). In democracies, local institutions have been viewed as more likely to engage citizens (Blakeley, 2010) and to deliver services responsive to citizen-consumers (Mohan and Stokke, 2000). International governmental organizations have seen decentralization to local governments, private-sector firms and third-sector organizations as one means of promoting democratic participation and accountability and ultimately governmental effectiveness (Batterbury and Fernando, 2006). These moves have been accompanied by debates about whether decentralization and the rise of neighbourhood governance reflect developments in ‘global policy’ (Cochrane, 2007)––especially neoliberalization––or more national, regional and local processes. Brenner and Theodore (2002) assert that ‘the new localism’ should be viewed as the ‘spaces of neoliberalism’. Decentralization should be seen as a response to the absence of a sustainable regulatory fix at the national scale in the context of globalization. Within the literature on neoliberalism, there have been debates between ‘Marxists’ and ‘Foucauldians’ (Peck and Tickell, 2012). The former imagine an uppercase Neoliberalism: a class-based ideology, characterized by fixed attributes, hierarchical power and global reach (Ong, 2007). The latter imagine a lower-case neoliberalism: a logic of governing and technique of administration, characterized by contingency and hybridity (ibid.). These debates have generated a range of useful concepts for thinking about policy developments around the world. Brenner and Theodore (2016) distinguish between ‘neoliberal ideology’ and ‘actually existing neoliberalism’. Peck et al. (2009)