Abstract: It is of great significance to explore the mechanism of villagers’ effective participation in water environment autonomous governance. Based on the theory of autonomous governance, this paper takes the villagers’ participation in water environment autonomous governance in Lianhua Village, Liujiang District, Liuzhou City, Guangxi Province as an example, and discusses the main mechanism of the village’s successful practice. The study finds that the implementation of autonomous governance can achieve the goals of setting up optimized autonomous organizations, mobilizing and incentivizing villagers to participate, regulating villagers’ governance behaviors and villagers’ autonomous supervision. The success of the village’s practice is related to four major autonomous governance elements and presents four important mechanisms, namely, operation mechanism, mobilization mechanism, reward and punishment mechanism and supervision mechanism. This provides a mechanism for other rural areas to promote villagers’ effective participation in water environment governance. It can be started from improving the operation mechanism of autonomous organizations, making a mobilization mechanism to reach a consensus among villagers for collective action on water environment management, implementing the reward and punishment mechanism of incentivizing and regulatingvillagers to participate, and implementing the collective responsibility of co-governance and supervision.

Keywords: villagers; water environment governance; self-governance; implementation mechanism

Reprinted from Guangxi Economic Journal, 2024,42(01):43-52.