Description
note: This is a work in progress for a joint paper by Zhiqi Xu and Wil Hout, presented at the Governance, Law, and Social Justice Seminar on Oct 3rd, 2023.Abstract: In China's four-decade-long journey of poverty alleviation (PA) practices, PA policies are characterized by a campaign-style approach involving substantial resources from the central government (Bikales, 2021). This raises questions about the role of policy entrepreneurs and other actors in the process. Existing studies often focus on national and provincial authorities, overlooking the grassroots government (Liu, 2022). This paper examines the nuanced case of China Foundation for Poverty Alleviation (CFPA), a government-organized non-governmental organization that has experimented with distinctive approaches to poverty alleviation involving various local actors, particularly through the Bonavilla (BV) project. BV is a community-based rural tourism development project which spans from 2000 to 2022, divided into two significant phases: the formation period (2000-2012) and the policy adoption and implementation period (2013-2022). BV represents a paradigm shift towards community-driven development and grassroots participation, serving as a model for participatory and community-based programs in rural areas (Liu, 2021).
Our analysis draws from a rich array of data sources, including first-hand interviews, site visits, and a diverse range of second-hand materials such as policy documents, public speeches, news reports, and academic papers. This comprehensive dataset enables a thorough exploration of the complexities within the BV project and the policy landscape.
We employ the Multiple Streams Framework (MSF, Kingdon, 2014), originally developed in democratic contexts, to analyze the policy-making process in an authoritarian country like China. While the MSF originated in democratic countries, recent studies have shown its applicability in authoritarian states under certain conditions (Herweg Zahariadis, & Zohlnhöfer, 2022; van den Dool, 2023). However, its application to analyze poverty alleviation policies in China remains limited, despite their critical role in societal welfare and economic development over the past four decades.
This paper aims to address three key questions. First, we explore how a GONGO outside of the policy-making machinery acts as a policy entrepreneur to realize its proposals in the Chinese context. Second, we investigate how grassroots and central agencies jointly influence policy innovation within BV. Finally, we seek to extract lessons from the BV project's formation, adoption and implementation processes to improve our understanding of MSF in autocracies and how policy processes differ from those in democracies.
Our paper is organized as follows: Section 2 introduces the analytical framework, the Multiple Streams Framework (MSF), and necessary adaptations in Chinese contexts. Section 3 provides the contextual background of the Bonavilla project and its founder, CFPA, within the broader policy landscape of poverty alleviation. Section 4 delves into the historical development of BV, spanning the formation period and the subsequent policy adoption and implementation phase. Section 5 employs MSF analysis to dissect the three streams that have influenced BV's trajectory. Section 6 explores the concept of policy windows and their relevance in the BV context. Finally, in Section 7, we draw conclusions, discuss our findings, and offer insights into the implications of our study for policy analysis and development practices.
This comprehensive examination of the Bonavilla project and its innovative approach to poverty alleviation sheds light on the dynamics of policy entrepreneurs and grassroots participation in shaping policy outcomes, contributing to the broader discourse on poverty alleviation strategies in authoritarian contexts.
| Period | 3 Oct 2023 |
|---|---|
| Held at | International Institute of Social Studies |
| Degree of Recognition | Local |