The Government’s Functioning of Meta-governance in Public Innovation

The functioning of meta-governance for the government is indispensable for government or public innovations. In light of theories of collaborative-interactive governance, the government performs four basic functions for meta-governance, including institution designs, framework building, process management and decision domination. In facing risks and uncertainties, the government needs to pay much attention to three special goals, namely 1) introducing participants with diverse backgrounds, resources and viewpoints; 2) booting multiple actors to accept creative destruction and encouraging them to input resources and bear the risks of innovations; and 3) supporting the cross-border diffusion and dissemination so as to further the public values of innovations. Therefore, the government must take six kinds of mutually complementary meta-governance actions as follows: building framework, formulating visions, managing interactions, mobilizing resources, participating directly and communicating across boundaries. The Chinese government’s idea of social governance manifesting in the guidance by the Party contraction, the domination of the government, as well as multi-actor participation and collaboration and practices of boosting public innovations has provided plenty of sources for the explorations on the theoretical frontier of public innovations.