A paper jointly written by Prof. Jianhua Xu, associate professor from the Department of Sociology, Faculty of Social Sciences, University of Macau, and Siying He, a MA graduate supervised by Prof. Xu, was published on China Quarterly, the widely acknowledged most authoritative journal in the field of China studies.
Good governance has always been the goal for the government but the road to it proves to be challenging. Based on longtime fieldwork in southern China, the paper explores how a new institutional design—the gird governance—works and the challenges it faces. Inspired by broken window theory in criminology and infrastructural power theory from political sciences, the paper provides important theoretical and practical insights for enhancing governance capacity, avoiding challenges and improving institutional design and innovation.