Private roles in enhancing Multi-Level Governance: China's “Internet + ” national strategy

Abstract

Multi-Level Governance engages players from multiple levels of governments and multiple sectors for better governance results. This paper argues that private actors may take a collaborative governance approach to facilitate intergovernmental policy making and implementation. Specifically, the rise of private sector economy in China has engendered interests and opportunities for resourceful private actors to link fragmented intergovernmental policy system. Using China's “Internet + ” national strategy as a case, the paper finds that internet firms, by adopting collaborative strategies like mediating, brokering, leveraging, and coordinating, contributed significantly to a concerted and swift process of intergovernmental policy making and implementation. Individual, industrial, institutional, and global factors together induced such unusual private activeness. The paper offers evidence of China's Multi-Level Governance practices and identifies an organic linkage in the formation and functioning of Multi-Level Governance.