Mission-Driven Agency and Local Policy Innovation: Empirical Analysis from Baoding, China

Abstract

The use of policy experiments or innovations, especially at the local level, since the opening and reform in China is well documented. Less understood is why and how these innovations are developed. This paper further enriches our existing understanding by bringing to light an institutional element that has been relatively under-studied: the role of mission-driven local government agency. Informed by detailed on-site ethnography and process-tracing, I use meso-level and micro-level analyses of Baoding (Hebei) to illustrate how such an organization ushered in unique changes to local governance to facilitate two prolonged instances of policy innovation since the early 2000s: clean energy industry cluster and low-carbon city. Building on the insights from the literatures on communities of practice and experimentalist governance, I argue that the ways in which the local agency engendered and sustained the innovations can best be described as “collective” experimentalist governance. The analyses suggest that local innovations in China cannot always be understood as an epiphenomenon of centrally-coordinated policy experimentation, cross-regional competition or learning, or local leadership that previous studies have frequently emphasized. The findings contribute to recent scholarship that has revealed varieties of local governance in contemporary China.