Association for Public Policy Analysis & Management

Rapid development of civil society in China has attracted worldwide attention in recent years. The implications of various aspects of NGO’s rise in China are being heatedly debated in the academic community. One approach is voluntarism, which emphasizes the autonomy and independence of NGO on its growth in authoritarian countries. The other is corporatism, which highlights the role of state on steering civil society’s development. Admittedly, each side has its rationality and limitation, making theoretical breakthrough possible and necessary.

In this paper, we construct a new framework to better explain the trajectory of NGOs’ development in China. First of all, two types of government-nonprofit partnership are classified: service procurement, which is a typical mode of government-nonprofit cooperation on early stage of civil society’s development, and collaborative governance, which means higher degree of state devolution to society and cooperation on an more equal footing. On this basis, we integrate theories from state-society relations, institutional change and social movement to illustrate how NGOs in China gradually transits from service procurement to collaborative governance. We argue that both the role of state on macro-level and the role of social entrepreneurs on micro-level are important, for the former creating “critical junctures” in institutional change, while the latter deciding if social actors can grasp the opportunity and change the fate of their own.

To examine this framework, a comparative case study was conducted in cities of China. Several cases of NGOs were chosen for analysis. Data collection was conducted from April 2014 to April 2015, through field work and second-hand materials gathering.

Three main findings are presented. Firstly, the “critical juncture” for NGOs to grow emerges as a result of state’s cooptation aiming to defy the gravitation toward liberal democracy in the process of rapid socioeconomic modernization. In this turning point, service procurement, which helping NGO to cultivate trust and achieve discursive power in its professional realm, plays as a prerequisite of collaborative governance and catalyzes the coming of next “critical juncture”. Secondly, when the window for transformation from service procurement to collaborative governance opens, the roles played by social entrepreneurs, including policy advocacy, personal relationship maintenance and organization formalization, are pivotal. Thirdly, for those reasons, the study concludes that the growth of civil society in China should be attributed to the combination of transformation of state function, huge demand of society and effort of social actors.