Empowerment-Oriented Growth: Practical Pathways for Social Work Agencies in Community-Level Governance

Abstract

In the process of advancing Chinese modernization and improving the social governance system, grassroots governance is gradually shifting from a “management-oriented” to an “empowerment-oriented” approach. How to stimulate the endogenous motivation of grassroots actors through empowerment mechanisms has become a key issue in promoting the modernization of social governance. Taking Community H in Yinchuan, Ningxia as a typical case, this study adopts a “resources–capabilities–institutions” analytical framework to systematically examine the evolutionary logic and staged characteristics of community empowerment. The findings indicate that empowerment-oriented growth is not a linear process, but rather follows a curvilinear trajectory of “initial empowerment—capacity cultivation—recurring dilemmas—organic growth.” In the initial stage, the concentrated infusion of external resources effectively activated community vitality but also generated dependency risks. During the capacity cultivation stage, resident leaders gradually emerged, and public participation shifted from “passive” to “active.” In the recurring dilemmas stage, administrative absorption and institutional formalization undermined the effectiveness of empowerment, leading to fluctuations. Ultimately, in the stage of organic growth, the integration of resources, maturity of capacities, and institutional embedding interacted to foster sustainable community governance. The study further reveals that resource empowerment provides the conditions, capacity empowerment shapes the driving force, and institutional empowerment ensures the consolidation of outcomes. The dynamic tension and interaction among these three dimensions across different stages constitute the internal logic of empowerment-oriented growth. Therefore, advancing the sustainable development of community governance requires the organic integration of diversified resource coordination, progressive capacity cultivation, and endogenous institutional embedding.