Introduction to Administrative Law Administrative law exists at the interface between the state and society – between civil servants and state institutions, on the one hand, and citizens, business fi rms, organized groups, and non- citizens, on the other. Civil service law and bureaucratic organization charts and rules provide an essential background, but our emphasis is on the law’s fundamental role in framing the way individuals and organizations test and challenge the legitimacy of the modern state outside of the electoral process. There are two broad tasks – protecting individuals against an overreaching state and providing external checks that enhance the democratic accountability and competence of the administration. Public law is the product of statutory, constitutional, and judicial choices over time; it blends constitutional and administrative concerns. The Germans speak of administrative law as ‘concretized’ constitutional law, and Americans often call it ‘applied’ constitutional law. The English, with no written constitution, refer to ‘natural justice’ and, more recently, to the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR). The French tradition of droit administrative contains within it a whole conceptual vocabulary – dualité de juridiction, acte administratif, service public – that has been deeply infl uential in many parts of the world (notably francophone Africa, the Middle East, and Latin America). East Asia has a long tradition of centralized, hierarchical, and bureaucratic rule – a sort of ‘administrative law’ avant la lettre. And yet, in forging its own modern variants, East Asia has also drawn on Western (and particularly German and US) models. Administrative law is one of the ‘institutions’ of modern government, in the sense that economists and political scientists often use that term (see, for example, North 1990: 3–5, March and Olsen 1989, 1998: 948). It is thus amenable to comparative political and historical study, not just purely legal analysis. Employing this broad perspective, we seek to illuminate both the historical legacies and the present- day political and economic realities that continue to shape the fi eld as we proceed into the twenty- first century. The distinction between public and private is essential to administrative law, a distinction that common law jurisdictions long sought to downplay by claiming that the same courts and legal principles should resolve both wholly private disputes and those involving the state. Nevertheless, even in the common law world, debates over the proper role and unique prerogatives of state actors are pervasive. Some scholars still assume that one can compartmentalize regulatory activities and actors into either a public or a private sphere. This may be analytically convenient, but it does not fi t the increasingly blurred boundary between state and society. Recent developments have also strained another familiar distinction – between justice and administration. In Europe, for example, courts regularly apply the principle of proportionality – if a policy interferes with a right, then it must be designed in the least restrictive way. As a result, courts have begun to impose standards on government policymaking, at least when rights are at stake. After that, a number of draft laws “On Administrative Procedure” were developed in Ukraine, the last 28.12.2018 and 14.05.2020, but the draft of these normative legal acts do not correspond to the status of the standard for the whole administrative activity, neither in content nor in form, but is only an attempt to resolve certain components of the publicadministrative activity. We can have various discussions about the compliance of Russian administrative legislation with the standards of general administrative law of democratic countries, but in reality, we are only on the way of transformation from managerial (police) law to protective (new administrative law). The existence of such a state of domestic administrative law is evidenced by the methods and means of the public administration, approved in the norms of administrative law. Administrative activity is a focused practical activity of authorized participants in social processes to streamline and harmonize social systems and processes using the means, procedures, and methods characteristic of power activities. Public-administrative activity is the cooperative activity of two entities of legal interaction that fulfil their own obligations, determined in the rules of law, aimed at considering and ensuring public and private interests by adopting administrative acts in the field of public administration. The typification of administrative activity is very important for the systematization of all administrative legislation since the main administrative activity should have general legal principles and procedures for its implementation. It is appropriate when local people want to be more organized and orderly, then they must follow the regulations that have been made by the local government itself, the regulations formed by the local government are regulating the wider community (public law), according to Gordon the rules governing the wider community are part of state administrative law In addition, the rules governing the wider community are drawn up by the government consisting of the executive, legislature and courts. In the regional context, there is no single party that has more authority than the local government itself which creates and exercises the power to regulate the local community, meaning that this has meaning that it is the government that creates the rules and the government is also the one who embodies these rules into government programs and or activities. Government programs and activities are regulated in the legal codification of regional regulations as part of state administrative law, this is for the sake of creating justice and order in local communities. Generally, regional regulations formed by local governments are not small, often local regulations are made to meet various kinds of problems in very complex aspects of community life, and these problems are relegated to regional regulations in order to prioritize the interests of the people, problems that often arise in the community are aspects of the economy or growth. regional welfare development (Angkadai, 2020). On March 30, 2019, a forest fire broke out in Li'er Village, Yalongjiang Town, Muli County, Liangshan Prefecture, Sichuan Province. The fire point was in high altitude, rugged terrain, variable climate, inconvenient transportation, and backward communication and rescue infrastructure. The forest fire caused 31 casualties. On April 5, the Emergency Management Bureau found out the cause of the fire and confirmed it was a lightning fire. The burning area of the fire was about 19 hectares. On April 7, the same fire spot in Muli, Liangshan re-ignited, and forest fires also broke out in other districts and counties at the same time. On March 30, 2020, a forest fire broke out on a ridge in Jingjiu Township, Xichang, Sichuan. During the rescue, 19 people died and 3 others were injured due to a sudden change in wind direction at the fire site. The forest fire caused a total damage of about 3,050 hectares, causing huge economic losses. In order to find out the cause of the fire, learn from experience and lessons, formulate practical emergency plans, and take corresponding measures to effectively prevent similar incidents from recurring, the Sichuan Provincial Party Committee and the Provincial Government decided to establish a special investigation team for fire incidents. After a comprehensive investigation, the direct cause of the "3.30" forest fire in Xichang, Liangshan was: the transformer was affected by the wind and wind direction and contacted with the telegraph pole to cause a malfunction. During the burning process, the fired object unfortunately fell on the grass, causing a spreading fire. The cause of the fire was non-man-made fire caused by the changing wind direction and strong wind. During the investigation by the task force, real problems were discovered, such as backward concepts in fire fighting and unmatched infrastructure. At the same time, the investigation team found the source of the unclear division of responsibilities of relevant functional departments and the inadequate implementation of responsibilities. The team was also aware of practical problems such as the lack of pertinence of the emergency response plan and the low efficiency of the emergency management system. Regarding the accountability of forest fires in Liangshan, five specific general directions need to be perfected, including "causes and characteristics of forest fires", "population rate of disaster prevention knowledge", "operations of emergency management system", "relevant emergency plans for specific objects research", "emergency plans". First, it is necessary to study and sort out the current situation of the emergency management system within China in the Sichuan-Chongqing region, mainly including the views of various subjects (governments, relevant agencies, and the masses) on the definition of "emergency plan", and investigate and study the current management problems, relevant laws and regulations on emergency management, the implementation of specific laws and regulations online and offline, etc. in the Sichuan-Chongqing region emergency management system. In addition, while collecting information and understanding the status quo, it is also necessary to think about the possibility and necessity of accelerating the legislative process related to emergency management, the pace of law enforcement, find certain solutions and plans, and actively contact professional-related theoretical knowledge for critical thinking. Research on administrative burden represents an important line of inquiry focusing on improving public service delivery. Administrative burden research has explicitly focused on understanding the experiences of citizens, in marked contrast to traditional public management research, which remains primarily practitioner-focused. Due to its primary focus on citizens’ experiences, administrative burden research has been useful in highlighting how hidden politics in the policy process affect and sustain persistent inequities in policy access (Herd 2015; Moynihan, Herd, and Harvey 2015; Heinrich 2016; Nisar 2018a; 2018b). This line of research further illustrates how administrative burden intersects with the discretionary authority of street-level bureaucrats creating a political space where socio-culturally ingrained racial, gendered, classed, and moral biases are often reinforced (Maynard-Moody and Musheno 2012; Nisar 2018a; 2018b). While previous literature has provided valuable insights on various dimensions of administrative burden and its cause and effects, little research has documented or analyzed how citizens respond to or cope with burdensome policies and behaviors. This is an important theoretical and empirical gap because the main reason for the appeal of administrative burden research is its deliberate focus on citizen experiences and behaviors while accessing state services. Therefore, it is critical that this line of inquiry does not present citizens as passive actors who simply experience or receive whatever burdensome rules, policies, or procedures they must face while accessing state services. A notable exception in this regard is the recent work of Christensen et al. (2020) that focuses on the cognitive resources and human capital of citizens as important factors influencing citizens’ ability to handle onerous rules, procedures, and behaviors while accessing state services. However, this insightful work also primarily focuses on factors like scarcity, health problems, and age-related cognitive decline that limit the agency of citizens. With a few notable exceptions like Danet and Hartman’s work (1972) on protozoa (use of personal influence) in Israel, Nisar’s (2018b) research on the Khawaja Sira resisting bureaucratic surveillance, and Bisgaard’s (2020) study of bureaucratic selfefficacy, factors that increase the ability of policy beneficiaries to respond to and/or contest burdensome rules and behaviors remain unexplored. Moreover, almost all previous research on the citizen side of administrative burden focuses on individual factors and experiences. The importance of other levels of social organization (group and/or networks), beyond a few exceptions (Heinrich 2016; Nisar 2018b), remains relatively understudied and undertheorized. To address these important limitations, we explore the following research questions: How do citizens respond to onerous public policies? What factors influence their ability to navigate burdensome public policies? To answer these research questions, we present evidence from an ethnographic study of female doctors in Pakistan. Our study helps understand the different strategies used by policy beneficiaries to respond to and contest onerous rules and behaviors while accessing state services. Based on the data from this wellresourced subgroup of citizens, our research makes multiple important contributions to administrative burden research. First, we show that citizens, when facing onerous rules and discretionary bureaucratic behaviors, actively and strategically try to reduce their administrative burden. To this end, they adopt strategies based on their cache of social, cultural, and economic capital. They also create and participate in formal and informal groups to cope with and to transform burdensome policies to their benefit. Second, our findings suggest that some costs associated with public policies are interchangeable, which can policy beneficiaries can use to their advantage. For example, in our research setting, citizens were frequently willing to bear high financial costs to reduce their waiting time while accessing maternity benefits. This suggests that not all administrative burdens are created equal and depending on citizen’s preference and policy context, some costs are more acceptable and easier to bear than others. This insight can be particularly useful in redesigning social policies, where some administrative burden is unavoidable, in a way that is more acceptable for target groups. Third, we present the idea of administrative capital: explicit or tacit knowledge of bureaucratic rules, processes, and behaviors. We suggest that citizens acquire administrative capital through their repeated exposure to bureaucracy; they learn about bureaucratic rules, processes, and behaviors through their recurrent interactions with the state and become better at dealing with administrative burden. Finally, our research also highlights the “dark” side of various strategies used by citizens while responding to onerous public policies. Since cultural, symbolic, and social capital is not uniformly distributed, people who have disproportionate access to capital are able to navigate administrative burden more efficiently than those who do not have access to these resources. This insight provides a more nuanced understanding of how administrative burden is implicated in creating inequities in policy access. Hu analyses the city’s nature of migration from three aspects. Demographically, the permanent non-registered population (changzhu fei huji renkou) has consistently exceeded the registered population (changzhu huji renkou) since 1989 (Figure 0.2). As of 2021, Shenzhen has a permanent population of 17.68 million, ranked number seven among all the Chinese cities. The permanent registered population is 5.56 million, constituting 31.5 per cent of the permanent population. The permanent non-registered population is 12.12 million, more than twice the size of the former, and constitutes 68.5 per cent of the total population. According to the Seventh National Population Census of the People’s Republic of China (2020), the average age of Shenzhen residents is 32.5 years old and only 3.22 per cent of the population is aged over 65 years old, making it the youngest city in China.