Institutional embedding, strategic behaviour and discourse transformation during policy transfer: a case study of the regional transfer of the river chief system in China

Why do transferred environmental policies change in discourse even within a shared institutional setting? This article examines that question through the regional transfer of China’s River Chief System (RCS) from Wuxi to Y City. Drawing on discursive institutionalism, it develops an institutional–behavioural framework to explain discourse transformation during policy transfer. The analysis is based on a qualitative case study using policy documents, official reports, and semi-structured interviews with officials in both the originating and recipient cities. The findings show that the RCS in Y City shifted from a collaborative governance discourse emphasising cross-departmental coordination to a routine management discourse centred on administratively manageable tasks. This transformation was produced through the interaction between institutional arrangements and actors’ strategic adaptation under routine governance conditions. The article contributes to policy transfer research by integrating institutional and behavioural analysis, showing how institutional constraints generate collusive actor strategies and how these, in turn, reshape policy discourse. For environmental policy and planning, it highlights how transferred governance instruments may retain their formal structure while losing the coordination-intensive logic on which their substantive effectiveness depends.