The Sustainability of the Project-Driven Innovation of Grassroots Governance: Influencing Factors and Combination Paths

Abstract

Governance innovation is an important topic in public administration research. Based on the empirical evidence of governance innovation in China, this paper analyzes the pathways to the sustainability of project-driven innovation in urban grassroots governance and reveals its complex causal relationships. Using the selected cases, a multidimensional analysis framework is constructed, and the qualitative comparative analysis method of fuzzy sets is used. It is found that there are three combined paths for the sustainability of innovation, namely dependent development, social embeddedness and government–society cooperation. The first two paths are the most common for the sustainability of innovation, and they cover most of the selected cases. Case tracking also reveals that innovation driven by project operation can stimulate the behavior of grassroots governance innovation, but it does not guarantee the sustainability of the innovation. The sustainability of innovation requires more mobilization of the grassroots society to enhance social embeddedness. Moreover, this study results provide inspiration for the sustainability of innovation in the later stages of projects.

1. Introduction

Government innovation is a leading topic in the field of public administration research. Since the country’s reform and opening up, the Chinese government has been in a process of transformation. In the new era of social development, the Chinese government attaches great importance to innovation in grassroots governance. In this context, local governments at all levels have a strong desire to carry out governance innovation. It is an important operating mechanism for local governments to promote grassroots governance (In China, grassroots governance refers to the governance of grassroots areas, such as urban communities and rural areas. Theoretically, urban grassroots governance refers to the management activities of the government, local communities, residents, non-profit organizations, volunteers and other subjects within the community regarding public affairs. In China, due to the special management system and the insufficient development of social forces, the policies, funds and other resources of community governance still mainly depend on the government. At present, urban grassroots governance in China is still a pattern of multisubject participation under the guidance of the government) innovation in order to attract social forces to participate in innovation through project-based operation. However, a project is a temporary activity used to provide specific products or public services. Project governance is a special governance method in China, and it is widely used by the government in the process of public affairs governance. The government uses project-based operations to achieve certain purposes. With the overall aim of achieving short-term goals as the starting point, project governance has some characteristics of “Temporary governance”. Taking Kunming City as the observation point, we tracked innovation projects and found that project-driven innovation of urban grassroots governance faced the dilemma of sustainable development. This seems to confirm the phenomenon indicated by existing studies: although there are many social governance innovations being carried out by local governments, most of them are short-lived and lack universality, resulting in fragmentation and short-term innovation. Scholars also pointed out that project operation has the characteristics of being “short-lived” and will face the dilemma of sustainable development after the completion of the project [1]. There seems to be a “project system paradox”. However, through further tracking of urban grassroots governance innovation projects, we found that project-driven innovation indeed easily dies out after the end of the project cycle, but some innovations can continue to operate and play a role in local governance. As a result, we present the following research problems: Why does urban grassroots governance innovation show a differentiated and sustainable pattern under the background of project-based operation? What antecedents does innovative sustainable development need?

The existing research mainly focuses on innovation initiated within the government. Based on the case of the “China Government Innovation Award”, the research mainly discusses the innovation subjects, content and characteristics of local governments. Studies related to governance innovation have focused on the motivations, models and success stories of innovation. Unfortunately, the existing research, to some extent, ignores the cooperative innovation between the government and society driven by government projects in the context of the current social governance transformation, and it also lacks a discussion on the sustainability of project-driven governance innovation. At present, the project-based operation mode has become an important strategy for local governments at all levels in China to promote the innovation of grassroots governance, but in practice, innovation still faces the dilemma of a short life and involution. Studying the sustainability innovation of grassroots governance holds significance for grasping the practical logic of grassroots governance innovation and enhancing the sustainability of governance innovation in the post-project period. Therefore, we focus on the project-driven innovation of grassroots governance. Using a qualitative comparative analysis method, we take the urban grassroots governance projects of Kunming as research objects and focus on the influencing factors of project-driven innovation in achieving sustainable development, thus revealing the complex causal path of the sustainability of project-driven innovation.

2. Literature Review and Analysis Framework

2.1. Literature Review

In the definition of innovation, Schumpeter’s research is often regarded as the starting point. He defines innovation as a process, from the germination of an idea to the development of a marketable product that can change the economy [2]. Schumpeter describes innovation as a “creative destruction”. Governance and public sector innovation also include service innovation (new ways of providing services) and other governance innovation (new forms of citizen participation and democratic institutions, etc.) [3]. In practice, innovation may involve multiple elements, and it may be multidimensional [3]. Rogers proposes that government innovation is not a purely objective creative process, but involves the government’s acceptance of certain new ideas and goals [4]. Walker also points out that the government can achieve innovation by updating the governance mode. As long as this mode is new to the government, it can be regarded as governmental innovation [5]. In [6], Yu proposes that government innovation is the creative reform carried out by public power actors to improve administrative efficiency and promote public interests. In this paper, the government is defined as the governance improvement activities carried out by public departments to solve practical social problems and adopt new governance thinking, rules and tools to promote public interests. The essence of the project-driven innovation of grassroots governance is that local governments participate in governance innovation by absorbing social forces through various projects. Projects are the carriers of governance innovation, and the project-driven innovation of governance is also a type of government innovation.

2.1.1. Sustainability of Innovation

The concept of “sustainability” was first proposed in the field of ecology, and then gradually applied to other disciplines. Studies on innovation sustainability appear to be relatively few in number, and include works by Van Acker and Bouckaert [7], Cinar et al. [8], Pradana et al. [9], etc. Cobian and Ramos argue that innovation can be considered sustainable if it is embedded in the routine activities of an organization [10]. In [7], Van Acker and Bouckaert define public-sector innovation sustainability as the stage of continued innovation in the organizational routine. Some scholars have pointed out that innovation sustainability can also refer to the core idea of a local government innovation: the persistence of technology in time and radiation in space. Lukman argues that innovation sustainability can refer to the continuous operation of the original behavior of innovation after a change in political leaders [11]. Borins et al. emphasize the conditions of innovation sustainability and point out the four main factors of a successful innovation process [12]. In China’s governance innovation practice, some scholars, starting from the evolutionary paradigm, have proposed that the essence of local government innovation sustainability is the retention and diffusion of the best factors of the innovation, thus promoting the process of further innovation of its subjects. We regard the sustainability of governance innovation as having two meanings: first, the elements of an innovation can continue and exist in time; second, the sustainability of innovation is produced, rather than the sustainability of innovation behavior. In the context of project-driven innovation, the sustainability of governance innovation specifically means that the elements of innovation can continue in the time dimension after the end of the project cycle.

2.1.2. Factors Affecting the Sustainability of Government Innovation

Scholars have mainly discussed the influencing factors of innovation sustainability through the aspects of innovation politics, management background, innovation characteristics, external environment, etc. Florian discusses the impact of ideas, policies and interest relationships among multiple entities in innovation sustainability [13]. Borins takes the case of American Local Government Innovation Awards as a research object and elaborates on the influencing factors of innovation sustainability and six innovation models [14]. Bartlett et al. point out that political factors affecting innovation sustainability include political support [8,15], personal attributes and interactions between political leaders and their environments [16,17].

The external environment includes cooperation [18,19], top-down political tasks or policy pressures [20] and the impact of global or local social problems or policy trends [21]. In a study by De Vries et al., attributes are asserted as important antecedents of the innovation process [22]. These include usefulness and performance [23]. Some scholars have also proposed that citizens play a key role in the transformation of sustainable development. In the face of the sustainability challenges of innovation, there is a need to develop a policy framework that takes citizens as the sources of innovation [24]. This also promotes the sustainable development of innovation through decentralization of local governments, globalization and citizen participation [25]. The reconstruction of technological innovation with coherent governance innovation can achieve social transformation for sustainable development [26].

In China, Wang and Huang were the first to discuss the influencing factors and related issues of local government sustainability innovation. Subsequently, other scholars also conducted extensive discussions on the sustainability factors of government innovation. They pointed out that the space provided by the state for innovation, the legitimacy of innovation and the change in officials’ positions have important impacts on the sustainability of innovation from the perspective of political factors. The agency theory proposes that politicians are authorized to decide on the policies and behaviors pursued by agents (administration) according to their interests; therefore, power over the future of innovation lies with politicians [27]. In fact, the government plays a key role in the innovation of grassroots governance; the government’s policy orientation, resource allocation, and government acceptance directly affect the sustainability of governance innovation. Yu studied the case of the “China Local Government Innovation Award” and pointed out that the support of leaders, people’s support, system guarantees and other factors are important factors for the sustainability of government innovation. In addition, some scholars have also studied the sustainability of innovation from the perspective of social structure. Based on the theory of social embeddedness, Korac, Saliterer and Walker demonstrate the important impact of the coincidence of innovation activities with the existing social structure and social demands on the sustainability of innovation [21]. From the perspective of citizens, Trischler et al. assert that citizens should be defined as an independent innovation source which plays a key role in sustainability transitions, and local governments should consider this for the sustainability of innovation [28].

To summarize, scholars have mainly discussed the influencing factors of innovation sustainability, including political factors, external environment, citizen participation, etc. However, on the whole, they basically adhere to the analysis perspective of nationalism, and emphasize more the innovation initiated within the government. In the process of the innovation of urban grassroots governance, the interaction between the government and society is the most direct and rich. With the continuous growth of social forces, the participation of social forces represented by social organizations and residents in governance innovation is becoming increasingly in-depth, and their impact on the sustainability of innovation cannot be ignored. Especially in the context of governance innovation driven by government projects, government, society and projects constitute an innovative action network. However, analysis of how they affect the innovation results is still rare in the literature. Therefore, we break away from the single nationalism paradigm and build a multidimensional perspective in this paper. We regard the project-driven innovation of governance as a kind of cooperative innovation between government and society, analyze the factors of society and examine the sustainability of innovation in urban grassroots governance from the perspective of actor–network theory.

2.2. Framework

According to actor–network theory, innovation activities are processes in which a variety of heterogeneous elements influence each other and finally form a structured network [29]. The term actors refers to all human and non-human elements. They have initiative and have different impacts on the achievement of system goals. The action process of innovation is the process of shaping the innovation network. In the context of the operation mechanism of the project system, the project is the carrier, connecting the government and society, local governments, social forces and innovation projects, which constitutes a core node of innovation operation. Combined with the research conclusions of the existing literature and empirical observation of the operation of projects, this work mainly discusses the antecedents and generation paths of the innovation sustainability of governance from the perspective of the dynamic roles of the core actors, local government, social forces and innovation projects in innovation development. The analysis framework is shown in Figure 1.

2.2.1. Dimension of Government

The local government is the core actor in the innovation of grassroots governance, and the project is released by the government. Thus, the behaviors and attitudes of the local government have an important impact on the sustainability of innovation. As the core actor, the initiative of a local government is reflected in providing political support. Specifically, in the context of governance in China, political support is mainly reflected in the affirmative statements and supportive behaviors of the superior government and local officials on innovation projects. Under the pressure of performance appraisal, governance innovation needs to pay special attention to political support from within the government [9]. On the one hand, local officials can significantly express and display their governance performance through governance innovation and promote governance innovation by pursuing the legitimacy of performance. Therefore, the projects that concern and are supported by the government are more likely to obtain political legitimacy in order to acquire resources. At the same time, governance innovation is a flexible reform without existing systems as guidance. Therefore, the attitude of leaders towards innovation is particularly important [9]. Furthermore, if the innovation project is approved by the superior government, it is easy to form a demonstration effect in the jurisdiction to realize the institutionalization of innovation. The research framework selects the willingness of officials and the support of superiors as the key variables needed to measure political support. Among them, the willingness of the chief officials refers to the value preference and willingness of the local chief officials to engage in innovation projects. Under the democratic and centralized bureaucratic system, the recognition of the local chief officials is an important factor. The power of the top leaders of the local government is highly centralized in China. The will of government officials directly affects the final outcome of the innovation project. In addition, superior support is also a political resource. Superior support represents the policy and financial support given by the higher-level government to innovation projects. It also shows that the attitude and inclination of the leaders from higher-level government are also important in the sustainability of innovation.

2.2.2. Social Dimension

The project-driven innovation of grassroots governance is an improvement activity carried out by the government based on changes in the current governance environment and governance needs. While grassroots governance is a systematic project, the governance cannot be isolated from society. On the contrary, social forces represented by social organizations are important executive subjects of governance innovation, and they also play a dynamic role in the innovation. According to empirical observation, we propose that social forces, as another core actor, play an active role in innovation as social embeddedness. Social embeddedness is a process in which new heterogeneous elements are embedded in the existing social structure, and through the addition of these new elements, the original institutional structure is activated and transformed. The essence of the innovation of grassroots governance is a kind of coordinated action between the government and society, so the sustainability of innovation is based on embeddedness. Specifically, it is a process of integration between the external rules composed of innovation projects and the internal rules composed of existing social structure elements. In the process of case tracking, we found that those innovations that can continue to operate after the project cycle have achieved varying degrees of social embeddedness. Firstly, this is reflected in the public’s support and high participation in innovation, and secondly, the innovation project is consistent with actual governance needs. At the same time, innovation can also integrate the social resources of different groups in the region. We selected three variables—social participation, social needs and social capital—to measure social embeddedness. Social participation is mainly reflected in the participation of social organizations, communities or individual citizens in the formulation or implementation processes of innovative projects. The social demand is mainly reflected in that the innovative project content comes from the residents’ demand and social problems, and project implementation can better respond to the social demand. Social capital is mainly embodied in the embedding of social resources other than government resources, such as social relationship networks and social rules, in the process of innovation.

2.2.3. Project Dimension

From the perspective of cooperative innovation between government and society, innovation projects are carriers of interactions between government and society, and the implementation of innovation activities should rely on innovation projects to complete. As a non-human actor, the project is also dynamic, but its action value needs to be realized through human actors. Rogers proposes that the relative advantages, compatibility, complexity and testability of the innovation affect its probability of adoption [4]. Susanto, E et al. point out that the attribute characteristics of innovation, such as the benefits and performance of innovation, are critical factors contributing to successful innovation survival [9]. Their research implies a hypothesis that an innovation with good attribute characteristics is easier to learn and imitate so as to achieve sustainability. We also believe that innovation projects can indirectly promote other actors to take further actions by providing their own attribute information, thus promoting the sustainability of innovation. Downs and Mohr [30] point out that the main attribute of innovation is its inherent characteristics. The secondary attribute refers to the characteristics perceived by individual users, such as cost perception. The micro-characteristics of innovation can be reflected in feedback on the effectiveness and impact of innovation projects, as well as social influence and social incentives in terms of media coverage and government attention. We selected two micro-characteristics, namely, the influence of innovation and project effectiveness, to measure the characteristics of innovation attributes. The impact and social benefits of innovation are good, which may indicate that society has a high degree of recognition and is more likely to be concerned with the government. Therefore, we can infer that the more positive features an innovation possesses, the more likely it is to be sustainable.

3. Methods, Data and Variable Descriptions

3.1. Methods

We mainly used the qualitative comparative analysis (QCA) method, which was first proposed by sociologist Ragin [31]. This is a research method based on the case-study-oriented theory, which emphasizes that problems can be solved through continuous dialogue between the empirical data and the theory. In general, using the QCA method, the causality of research topics can be constructed from a small amount of sample data. Traditional quantitative analysis methods usually assume that there is a linear causal relationship between things, while QCA assumes that the causal relationship of social phenomena is nonlinear and emphasizes that multiple concurrent causal relationships are explained by identifying the different paths of the same results. This paper adopts fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA) for the following reasons. First, the project-driven innovation of governance involves the participation and interaction of multiple subjects, so the sustainability of innovation is a combination of multiple factors. The QCA method effectively avoids the disadvantages of single-case and single-factor analysis and can systematically analyze the combination of conditions among different influencing factors through the comparison of multiple cases. Second, the cases selected in this paper consist of small- and medium-sized samples, and QCA is only suitable for the analysis of small- and medium-sized samples. The microdata on the project-driven innovation of governance obtained through research are limited, and fsQCA provides an operable path for analyzing small samples and multiple variables of cases. Moreover, compared with clear-set qualitative comparative analysis, fsQCA processes the values of different variables into membership scores between 0 and 1. This breaks the limitation of the dichotomous variable and can better reflect the actual situation and ensure the relative accuracy of the study.

3.2. Case Selection and Data Collection

In this paper, we take the project-driven innovation of urban grassroots governance as the research object and discuss the complex causal relationship that affects the sustainability of innovation with the QCA method. Several principles should be followed in the selection of research cases. First, the selected cases should have a certain similarity at the factual level and meet the typicality, diversity and certainty of results. Second, “positive” cases and “negative” cases need to be included in the cases, which are comparable in relevant dimensions. Third, the materials required for case studies should be available and comprehensive. The materials obtained from the case include questionnaires, interview records, official policy documents, media reports and other supporting materials obtained from field research. Fourth, the number of samples must match the number of variables.

Based on the above criteria, this paper selects 30 innovation cases collected by district-level governments in the field of community governance within the city of Kunming as the object of analysis. Kunming was selected for the following reasons: First, Yunnan is representative of the minority regions on the southwest border, and Kunming, as the capital city of Yunnan Province, was an early adopter of social governance innovation. There are cases of governance innovation in Kunming that have been recognized by the central government, and there are also innovative projects that have been awarded the “National Outstanding Case of Municipal Social Governance Innovation”, so the case of Kunming is a typical case in the southwest border minority region. In addition, existing studies have focused more on social governance innovation cases in the eastern and central regions of China, and not enough attention has been paid to governance innovation in the less economically developed regions of the southwest border. At the same time, Kunming City is relatively less developed in terms of economic development compared with the central and eastern regions of China, and the proportion of local finance spent on social governance is small. With the fiscal revenues of the subordinate district-level governments also varying, innovation projects in each district receive different levels of government funding support and the differences in the sustainability samples of innovation projects are more pronounced; this also provides an observable and differentiated sample for the study.

The cases were mainly selected from the list of grassroots governance innovation projects collected by the district-level governments in Kunming. Generally speaking, the project cycle is one year. As this paper investigates the sustainability of the content elements of innovation projects in the time dimension, the innovation projects in 2019 and 2020 were finally selected to more objectively observe whether the innovations are sustainable. The judgment of innovation sustainability was made 10 months after the end of the innovation project cycle and was mainly evaluated based on the project’s output, project effectiveness and financial investment. If the community secretary and the project leader evaluated the innovation project as “the main content of the project realizes independent operation in the place of implementation”, “the project content is upgraded to a local system” or “the project obtains continuous operation with the support of continuous government funds”, we consider the governance innovation to be sustainable; if the innovation is assessed as likely to “disappear after the project content is completed”, “project implementation is terminated halfway” or “project content is only temporarily continued”, it is deemed as not sustainable. The 30 selected cases effectively covered both “continuous” and “unsustainable” outcomes. The cases were selected as shown in

Table 1. Overview of case selection.

Code of Case Name	Frequency	Sustainability	Assignment
SQYZ, QBXQ, WZWS, JMRH, LSKCX, ZHHZL, HSYL, LZFXQ, MLYZ, ETAJH, SJYSW, LYZZ, HZYL, XFDN, TXTD, YZSW, LLXZ, ZHCX, MZXS, XFJY	20	sustainable	1
MLJH, JRZJ, FJSZY, XFSN, SWYTS, LDDHD, CSCS, XTHL, GAJR, SQZZZ	10	unsustainable	0

below (the case name codes in the table are abbreviations of the innovation project names).

In terms of data collection, relevant information was mainly obtained through issuing questionnaires, semi-structured interviews, media reports, etc. Finally, according to the setting and coding rules of the outcome variable and condition variable, the original case data were converted into a truth table, and data analysis was carried out using QCA3.0 software (available from the website http://www.socsci.uci.edu/~cragin/fsQCA/software.shtml, accessed on 1 October 2021.) to obtain data results.

3.3. Variable Descriptions and Assignment

For the outcome variable, we set “whether the innovation project of urban grassroots governance is sustainable” as the outcome variable and collected project information by combining interviews and questionnaires. After the project cycle ended, it was decided that “the main content of the project realizes independent operation in the place where it is implemented”, “the content of the project rises to the local system” or “the project obtains continuous operation with the support of the government’s continuous funds”. We regarded the governance innovation project as sustainable and assigned a value of 1. If the innovation was evaluated as “the project content disappears after the completion of the project”, “the project implementation is terminated halfway” or “the project content only lasts for a short time”, the innovation was considered unsustainable, and the value is 0. The resulting assignment of 30 cases is shown in Table 1.

In terms of conditional variables, QCA research design pursues a good balance between the number of cases and the number of conditions. For 10–40 medium-size samples, the best explanation conditions are 4–7 [23]. The analysis framework outlined above constitutes the basic category of conditional variable selection. On the basis of comprehensive consideration of such factors as the integrity of the theoretical framework, data accessibility and operability, this study finally selected seven conditional variables from the three dimensions of political support, social embeddedness and innovation attributes.

• Will of government officials (WGO). Relevant research shows that many innovative projects benefit from the decisions of innovative leaders [19]. Most government officials also regard innovation projects as important governance achievements. In reality, projects initiated by and involving local key officials and leaders of project management departments are more likely to attract the attention of decision-makers and achieve sustainable development during the tenure of key officials. Therefore, in this paper, the attention and involvement of local government officials and leaders of project-contracting departments in innovative projects are regarded as the core criteria for judging the willingness of officials. The outcome variable was assigned a value of 1 if all of the following conditions were met: (1) The project is initiated by the project authority. (2) Initiated inquiries or inspections of the project’s progress. (3) The project authority is involved in the project design or in the project implementation process. (4) The project authority frequently contacts the project implementer. If the number of cases corresponding to the above evaluation criteria decreased in turn, the values were 0.75, 0.5, 0.25 and 0, respectively.
• Superior support (SS). In China’s bureaucratic system, local governments at all levels are arranged in a certain hierarchical structure. The recognition of the innovation by the superior government can not only obtain political legitimacy for the innovation, but also obtain more resources within the system. In practice, governance projects can only be set up with the support of superior financial funds. Therefore, this paper regards the support of the superior government as a key variable of innovation sustainability. Generally speaking, superior support is mainly reflected in policy and financial support. We mainly took the innovation project design from the superior policy, whether the superior government had further issued relevant supporting policies, and whether financial support was clearly given as the core criteria for judgment. If the innovation project met the above three indicators, the value is 1. If the number of cases meeting the above evaluation criteria decreased in turn, the values were 0.66, 0.33 and 0, respectively.
• Social participation (SP). Social participation refers to the participation of social forces in the process of innovative design and implementation. Social power is the basis of social legitimacy for the innovation of grassroots governance. Only when the public participates in the formulation and implementation of innovation can real innovation be achieved. At present, local governments often attract social organizations and communities to participate in governance innovation in the form of projects, which involves not only interaction between the government and social organizations, but also interaction between social organizations, residents, enterprises and other social subjects. Therefore, this paper regards the participation of social forces in the process of innovative design and implementation as the core judgment standard. In the process of innovation project design and implementation, if residents, communities, other social organizations, enterprises, foundations and other subjects participate, the value was assigned as 1; if residents and communities participate in the design and implementation of innovative projects, the assigned value was 0.66; if there was only one type of subject involved, the value was 0.33; otherwise, the value assigned was 0.
• Social needs (SN). Social needs mainly refers to the matching between innovative projects and social demand. The innovation of urban grassroots governance is endogenous to society. From the perspective of government governance, the project-driven innovation of governance is to better meet the actual needs of residents. As for the project recipients, their perspective is more based on their own professional ability to respond to social needs. Only by matching with social needs can innovation be recognized and supported by residents and can it achieve sustainable development. In this paper, cases in which innovative project design comes from residents’ demand surveys, actual social problems and the implementation of innovative projects responding to social needs were assigned as 1; if the number of cases meeting the above evaluation criteria decreased in turn, the values were 0.66, 0.33 and 0, respectively.
• Social capital (SC). According to Professor Putnam’s definition, social capital refers to the characteristics of social organizations, such as trust, norms and network forms [32]. Scholars point out that social capital can promote the sustainable development of public governance. According to the relevant theoretical definitions of social capital and empirical observations, social capital in innovation projects is more reflected in resource support from multiple social subjects, the social relationship network in the project implementation area, and some action norms formed within the organizational groups. Therefore, we took self-organization, social resources and institutional rules as the criteria to measure social capital. The outcome variable was assigned a value of 1 if all of the following conditions were met: (1). Self-organization is formed during the implementation of the project. (2). The project is supported by the resources of the community, other social organizations, enterprises, foundations and other subjects. (3). The project has a channel to raise funds. (4). It has formed a clear internal management rule. If the number of cases meeting the above evaluation criteria decreased in turn, the values were 0.75, 0.5, 0.25 and 0, respectively.
• Project influence (PI). Project influence refers to the subsequent influence generated by the implementation of innovative projects. The scholar Rogers pointed out in his innovation diffusion theory that the characteristics of innovation, such as comparative advantage, compatibility and innovation impact, will have an impact on innovation adoption [4]. From the perspective of the motive force of project-driven innovation, the local government must make up for its own functional deficiencies on the one hand, and pursue certain innovative achievements on the other hand. Therefore, those innovative projects with good innovation performance that can be perceived and measured are more likely to receive attention. In fact, we learned from interviews with people involved in numerous cases that innovative projects that are well reported and publicized by the media are often favored by the government, which is willing to continue to provide corresponding financial support for innovation. In this paper, project influence is taken as a key variable, and the reports of provincial and municipal mainstream media and whether the project has had an impact on government policies are taken as the judgment criteria. If the innovation has been reported by the provincial and municipal mainstream media, which has promoted the government to issue relevant supportive policies, and the innovation has been named as excellent or a key case by the relevant government departments, the value was 1; if the above two criteria are met, the assigned value was 0.66; if one criterion is met, the assigned value was 0.33; otherwise, the assigned value was 0.
• Project effectiveness (PE). Project effectiveness refers to the actual effects and output of the implementation of innovative projects. Similar to the above conditional variables, project effectiveness is also one of the characteristics of innovation attributes and one of the influencing factors of innovation diffusion. In fact, through the follow-up survey of the “China Local Government Innovation Award” project, scholars found that characteristics such as the actual effect of the award-winning project and the adaptability of the innovation project were the main factors for the sustainability of government innovation. We took the evaluation results of innovative projects, obtaining public support and resolving practical governance problems as the conditions to measure the effectiveness of projects. If the case met the requirements of “the project meets the standard smoothly”, “promotes the autonomous governance of community affairs”, “the project solves a governance problem in the community”, and “the implementation is smooth and the people support” in the questionnaire options, the value was assigned as 1; if the quantity decreased according to the above corresponding criteria, the values were assigned as 0.75, 0.5, 0.25 and 0, respectively.

4. Result Analysis

4.1. Single-Variable Necessity Analysis

According to the general operation steps of QCA, the necessity of a single condition variable should be analyzed first. Based on the above assignment of conditional variables, an affiliation calibration was performed to obtain a truth table for 30 cases, leading to an analysis of univariate necessity. Consistency and coverage are the key inspection indicators. In general, when the condition variable is greater than 0.8, it can be regarded as a sufficient condition, and when it is greater than 0.9, it can be regarded as a necessary condition. The calculation results are shown in

Table 2. Single-variable necessity analysis results.

Conditional Variable	Outcome Variable (Sustainable)		Outcome Variable (Unsustainable)		Conditional Variable	Outcome Variable (Sustainable)		Outcome Variable (Unsustainable)
	CON	COV	CON	COV		CON	COV	CON	COV
WGO	0.894	0.824	0.478	0.227	~WGO	0.151	0.357	0.610	0.751
SS	0.491	0.920	0.169	0.165	~SS	0.554	0.561	0.918	0.486
SP	0.895	0.701	0.818	0.335	~SP	0.151	0.613	0.270	0.573
SN	0.846	0.765	0.585	0.277	~SN	0.200	0.479	0.503	0.631
SC	0.583	0.861	0.267	0.206	~SC	0.462	0.547	0.821	0.508
PI	0.203	0.905	0.128	0.299	~PI	0.843	0.649	0.959	0.386
PE	0.804	0.784	0.511	0.261	~PE	0.242	0.486	0.577	0.606

Note: “~”: The opposite of the condition; CON: Consistency; COV: Coverage.

.

Through the above analysis results, it can be found that the consistency of WGO and SP is 0.894 and 0.895, respectively, which is close to the consistency threshold (0.9) of the necessary conditions and can almost be regarded as a necessary condition for the continuity of the project. The consistency of “SN” and “PI” is 0.846 and 0.804, respectively, both exceeding 0.8, which can be considered as sufficient conditions for the “sustainability” of the results. Secondly, the consistency between “~PI” and “~SS” exceeds 0.9, which can be recognized as a necessary condition for the “unsustainability” of the results. When an innovation project cannot be sustainable, the innovation project mostly lacks project influence and support from the superior government. In addition, the consistency of all single variables does not reach the specified threshold of 0.8, which means that although they have a certain impact on the results, they cannot constitute a sufficient condition for the results to have “sustainability” or “unsustainability”. It can also be seen from the data that the consistency of most single variables is lower than the consistency threshold, 0.9, of the necessary conditions; that is, each explanatory variable is not enough to constitute a necessary condition for the sustainability of innovation projects. Any single variable cannot explain the reason for the appearance of the outcome variables. Therefore, it can be considered that innovation sustainability is the result of a combination of multiple variables, which also verifies the necessity of this paper to study innovation sustainability from the perspective of configuration.

4.2. Condition Configuration Analysis

According to Boolean operation and logic relation rules, fsQCA conducts sufficiency analysis on multiple factors in multiple cases, so as to find several possible paths (i.e., configurations) where outcome variables appear. Referring to the existing research, the consistency threshold of configuration analysis was set to 0.8, and the frequency threshold was set to 1. According to the analysis steps of fsQCA, we first calibrated the value of the condition variable, and then obtained the truth table (

Table 3. Truth table analysis.

Conditional Variables							Result	Cases	Consistency	PRI
WGO	SS	SP	SN	SC	PI	PE
1	1	1	1	1	1	1	1	HSYL, LYZZ	1	1
1	1	1	1	1	0	1	1	SQYZ	0.9340	0.9222
1	1	1	1	0	0	1	1	WZWS, HZYL, XFJY	0.9089	0.8944
1	0	1	1	1	0	1	1	LSKCX, ZHHZL, TXTD	0.8341	0.8140
1	0	1	0	1	0	1	0	ZHCX	0.7092	0.6468
1	0	1	1	0	0	1	0	ETAJH, MZXS	0.6879	0.6456
1	0	1	1	0	0	0	0	YZSW	0.5810	0.5041

). Following this step, fsQCA software was used for configuration analysis. There are usually three kinds of combined paths: the conservative solution, the intermediate solution and the parsimonious solution. Because the counterfactual analysis is not included in the logical remainder, the composite solution in the output result is consistent with the intermediate solution. Since an important advantage of the intermediate solution is that it does not allow the elimination of necessary conditions, generally speaking, the configuration structure of the intermediate solution is adopted, and then the core and edge conditions of the configuration are determined according to the simplified solution and the intermediate solution. See

Table 4. Parsimonious solution.

	Parsimonious Path	Raw Coverage	Unique Coverage	Consistency
Parsimonious solution	P1: SS	0.4914	0.1624	0.9202
	P2:SN × SC	0.5081	0.1792	0.8788
	Overall solution coverage: 0.6706; Overall solution consistency: 0.8783.

and

Table 5. Condition configuration of the sustainability of governance innovation.

Condition	Innovation Sustainability Path
	I1	I2	I3
WGO	•	•	•
SS	⬤		⬤
SP	•	•	•
SN	•	⬤	⬤
SC		⬤	⬤
PI	⊗	⊗
PE	•	•	•
Raw coverage	0.4264	0.4132	0.3289
Unique coverage	0.1461	0.1330	0.0487
Consistency	0.9333	0.8550	0.9432
Overall solution coverage	0.6081
Overall solution consistency	0.8828

Note: “•” indicates that the condition exists; “⬤” indicates that the condition exists and is the core condition; “⊗” indicates that the condition is missing; blank spaces indicate “don’t care”.

for the results.

Table 4 shows two parsimonious paths and the conditions of the paths are core conditions. Table 5 shows three driving paths that can explain the sustainable development of grassroots governance innovation, with an overall coverage of 0.6081, which has high explanatory power of necessity. The consistency of the solution is 0.88, which is above the consistency threshold, indicating that the three combination paths can become sufficient conditions for the sustainable development of innovation. Among them, the condition that both the reduced solution and the intermediate solution exist is regarded as the core condition, and the path is named accordingly.

(1)

Type of dependent development

Conditional configuration I1 = WGO × SS × SP × SN × ~PI × PE. Representative cases include SJYSW, SQYZ, WZWS, JMRH and LZFXQ. This path shows that superior support is the core condition for the sustainability of innovation, and the sustainable development of innovation mainly depends on the attention and support of superior governments. In this development path, the governance innovation is also initiated and promoted by the government. Although governance activities have a certain degree of social participation, in the post-project period, the sustainable development of innovation still needs to rely on the attention of the government and the project resources it provides. We call this the “dependent development type”. SJYSW is a typical case of “dependent development”, and the “political embeddedness” in innovation projects is more obvious. Political embeddedness refers to the formal or informal connection between the innovation project and the government and its personnel in terms of structure or emotion. From the perspective of the origin of the project, project creativity comes from leaders. At the same time, due to the limited internal human resources of the grassroots government, and the lack of experience in building the residents’ discussion and consultation platform and self-organization training, social organizations were introduced as the project executors in the way of project cooperation. During the implementation of the project, the main leaders of the subdistrict government attached great importance to the progress of the project and inspected the project site many times. At the same time, the district government also provided additional financial support for the project. At present, since the end of the first project cycle, the subdistrict government has promoted the sustainable development of the governance model of a “three-level discussion network” in the form of projects through continuous cooperation with social organizations. The consistency of the dependent developmental path reached 0.9333, which indicates that the path has strong explanatory power. The net coverage of the solution is 0.1461, which indicates that the path can effectively explain about 15% of cases.

(2)

Type of social embeddedness

Condition configuration I2 = WGO × SP × SN × SC × ~PI × PE, and the representative cases are SQYZ, LSKCX, ZHHZL and HSYL. This path coincides with the simple path P2: SN*SC. The key factor and core feature of the path is “social demand and social capital”, which means that the innovation project has achieved good results and received a certain degree of attention from local officials. Even without a new round of government project funds, innovation can rely on social forces and social capital support to achieve sustainable development. In this path, local governments do not play a dominant role in the sustainability of innovation. The active embedment of social forces and resource support in governance are the key forces for the sustainability of innovation. Local governments are mainly responsible for policy supply, organizational mobilization and supervision. Therefore, this paper calls this innovative development path “social embeddedness”. HSYL is a typical case of this path. In the post-project period of the “Red Courtyard Community” governance model, it mainly relies on the embedding of endogenous social forces, and on this basis, it promotes the sustainable development of innovation through the activation of horizontal social network resources such as community governance talents and community self-organization. This also means that social forces are the core forces in the innovation action network. After the end of the government project cycle, the innovation can rely on endogenous actors and endogenous resources to achieve self-growth. The consistency of the “social embeddedness” development path reached 0.8550, indicating that the path has strong explanatory power, and the net coverage of the solution is 0.1330, indicating that the path can effectively explain about 13% of cases.

(3)

Type of political and social cooperation

Condition configuration I3 = WGO × SS × SP × SN × SC × PE. Representative cases include SQYZ and LYZZ. In this path, the sustainability of innovation is the result of interaction and cooperation between the government and society. In other words, the sustainable development of innovation has not only the concern and financial support of the government, but also the injection of social forces and social resources. Innovation cannot rely solely on the power of the government and society to achieve sustainable development. In China, the special management system has led to the underdevelopment of social forces. In the pattern of government–society relations, the government is on the strong side and cooperation is essentially a development of social dependence on the government. Since this path essentially coincides with the first path, and the net coverage of the solution is 0.0487, it can effectively explain about 5% of cases, and the scope of interpretation is limited. This work does not explain this path in detail.

4.3. Robustness Test

In order to ensure the stability and reliability of the analysis results, we refer to the robustness test methods proposed by Schneider and Wegman [33], that is, changing the PRI threshold, the consistency threshold and the frequency of cases, and conduct robustness tests in different ways. The results are shown in

Table 6. Robustness test.

Condition Setting	Paths Comparison and Analysis
	I1:	WGO × SS × SP × SN × ~PI × PE	I2:	WGO × SP × SN × SC × ~PI × PE	I3:	WGO × SS × SP × SN × SC × PE
PRI > 0.80	√		√		√
PRI > 0.85	√		√		√
Consistency threshold >0.85	√				√
Consistency threshold >0.90	√				√
Frequency = 2	√		(√)		√

Note: “√” is placed in cases where the same solution paths occur; “(√)” is placed where the solution term is comparable, just one case added or removed vs. initial analysis; blank spaces indicate the path is missing.

. The tests show that the path obtained by the analysis has good robustness. First, we must check the robustness of PRI consistency and increase the PRI consistency from 0.75 to 0.8 and 0.85, and the resulting combination paths are basically consistent. The overall consistency of the configuration increases from 0.8 to 0.85 and 0.9. Compared with the original three paths, the second path (WGO × SP × SN × SC × ~PI × PE) is missing. Second, the case frequency is increased from 1 to 2, and the paths generated are basically the same. Only in the second path is there a variable difference from the original I2 path. In general, the core conditions of the configuration have not changed significantly, and some changes in the edge conditions are not enough to change the research conclusions, so the research result is robust.

5. Discussion and Conclusions

5.1. Discussion

We focus on the sustainability of project-driven innovation of grassroots governance and discuss the combinatorial paths to innovation sustainability. Compared with established studies, we have stepped out of a single theoretical analysis perspective and constructed a multidimensional analytical framework to analyze project-based innovations. The sustainability of project-based public governance has been noted by scholars, who argue that there seems to be a “project paradox”. Since the projects have only short-term effects, the original project components become extinct when government resources are lost at the end of a project. We propose that the unsustainability of governance innovation after the end of the project is a symptomatic problem, and that the root of the problem lies in the lack of effective incentives and the dilemma of collective action in grassroots governance. This also illustrates that the dilemma of collective action, a difficult problem in grassroots social governance, is a dilemma that always needs to be solved. At the same time, the key to the innovation sustainability of urban grassroots governance in a project-driven context is whether it can be “socially embedded”. This also means that the innovation of grassroots governance needs to further stimulate social vitality and integrate more social resources.

5.2. Conclusions

This research took 30 innovation projects of grassroots governance in Kunming as the research case, conducted cross-case analysis with the help of the configuration perspective and QCA method, refined explanatory variables under the guidance of the analysis framework established in the paper, and obtained three innovative sustainable development paths with different configurations by using fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis. The main research conclusions are as follows:

First of all, this study followed the logic of traceability and explored the antecedents of the sustainability of project-driven innovation of grassroots governance. Through research, it was found that the sustainability of innovation of grassroots governance is not the result of a single factor, but the result of the combined effect of local officials’ will, superior support, social participation, social capital, project effectiveness and other factors, which have a certain explanatory power for the outcome variables. Through univariate necessity analysis, we found that seven conditional variables affecting the sustainability of innovation projects did not reach the consistency threshold of the necessary conditions. The existence or absence of different explanatory variables can form the sustainable development of innovation.

Secondly, the sustainable development of innovation involves three paths, namely dependent development, social embeddedness, and political and social cooperation. Among these, the net coverage of the cooperative development path of government and society is low, and its explanatory power is limited. Moreover, under China’s governance system, the relationship between the government and society is a “strong government weak society” pattern, and the cooperative development path of government and society is essentially included in the dependent development path. Therefore, the research focuses on explaining the first two paths. In general, the sustainability of innovation of grassroots governance mainly achieves sustainable development through the continuous promotion of local government projects and the embedding of social forces and resources. The two development paths also represent the core forces and actors on which the sustainable development of innovation depends.

In addition, through the comparison of the three development paths, it was found that they have two key elements: First, the local government’s attention and financial support are key to the sustainable development of project-driven innovation, but this innovation mobilized through government projects is intermittent, and social viability cannot be increased, so when the government project support is completed, the innovation still cannot achieve independent operation. Second, in the “social embeddedness” development path, the embeddedness of social forces and social capital is particularly important. The governance innovation embedded in the society has the characteristics of self-organization and autonomous governance, which gives the grassroots governance activities the abilities of self-promotion and self-growth. Therefore, the long-term operation of the innovation of grassroots governance requires more consideration of institutional incentives, democratic consultation, self-organization and other factors. For the government, on the one hand, it is necessary to establish a long-term financial system to ensure that innovative projects can receive sustained financial support. On the other hand, when releasing the project, it is also necessary to further investigate the actual needs of grassroots governance and the ability of independent governance.

As an exploratory study, there are areas where the study could be improved. First, this paper uses a combination of quantitative and qualitative data and, like other QCA studies, faces the common adjustment of deepening the case study. Second, in terms of case selection, the paper mainly bases its findings on a sample from Kunming, an economically underdeveloped region in the west of China, so in the future, cases and data from developed regions in central and eastern China should be widely collected for comparative analysis to supplement and validate the findings. Finally, we focus on the grouping path of sustainability of project-driven governance innovation, and other types of innovation cases should be included in the future to enrich the findings of this study.