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

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.