Coproduction of community public service: evidence from china’s community foundations

With the resurgence of interest in community foundation (CF), questions arise around how do CFs produce and deliver community public services. Although the CF has a long history, the rapid development of CFs around world became the significant institutional change in local public affairs, the functions of CFs have received little attention in the literature. The existing literature about CFs usually be dichotomy: model or movement. This article presents a new theoretical framework, according to whether there are individual or collective coproduction and they participate top-down or bottom-up, to explain the function of China’s CFs. Coproduction advocates intensive engagement and collaboration of citizens in community public service delivery. And coproduction seems to play an important role in both instrumental and symbolic terms in the production and delivery of public goods or services by joining-up government, for-profit and non-profit organizations. The findings show how the CFs provide public services in China through the lens of coproduction that involves sharing information, resources, activities, risks and decision-making in a bid to achieve an agreed public outcome. In the new governance, many governments are moving away from agency-centric bureaucracy and towards citizen-centric mission to delivering public services.