The Initiation And Sustainability Of Street-level Innovation——An Case Research On A Regulatory Innovation By Z Municipal Public Health Supervision Institute

Local government innovation is generally regarded as an important category of local government performance,and existing research on local government innovation generally defaults the innovation subject to the first-level local government.However,many cases and recent studies also show that it is often the departments of local government,especially those responsible for front-line implementation,and their personnel that actually initiate innovation.These front-line departments and their personnel are what established studies call “street-level bureaucracy” and “street-level bureaucrat”;and the innovations initiated by them can be referred to as “street-level innovation”.Street-level innovation has become an important theme in the English-language literature in the field of public administration,and the examination of this theme in domestic contexts is still in its infancy.However,there is value in examining such innovations in the domestic context in order to deepen and develop established local government innovation research.Based on this understanding,this paper takes the example of the Z municipal public health supervision institute(which,while directing the work of the city’s county and district health supervision offices,is also directly responsible for health supervision in the city’s two non-supervisory districts,and thus falls within the realm of street-level bureaucracy),which has developed an innovation in public health supervision model called “dynamic quantitative supervision”,with the aim to answer two questions: firstly,how were the street-level innovations initiated,i.e.why were they initiated and how were they successfully initiated? Secondly,what makes the street-level innovations sustainable after they have been successfully initiated? The theoretical and case study analysis in this paper shows that: the resolution of street-level dilemmas is the immediate motivation for the initiation of street-level innovations,while the dynamism of street-level bureaucracy managers(attributes of street-level policy entrepreneurs)is crucial for the successful initiation of innovation;after successful initiation,street-level innovation needs to be proved effective through the actions of street-level bureaucrats and effectively avoid legitimacy risks in order to be sustained and thus sustainable;but if diffusion of innovation is also considered as a specific form of innovation sustainability,the sustainability of a street-level innovation in the place where it was initiated does not necessarily mean that it will be diffused to other areas.Both coercion and spontaneous attraction are necessary for completing the process of innovation diffusion finally.