摘要：Policy innovation involves two stages: local innovation and national scaling-up. Existing studies often conceptualize this process as a linear 'pilot-to-scale' trajectory, thereby overlooking potential discontinuities in the underlying logic when local innovations are elevated to national policy. The specific pathways through which local innovations, particularly borrowed innovations, achieve upward diffusion remain insufficiently explored. Drawing on policy transfer theory while incorporating policy attributes and the institutional features of hierarchical experimental governance, this article uses the 'X-Chief Systems' (XCS) derived from the River Chief System (RCS) as its empirical case and employs fuzzy-set Qualitative Comparative Analysis (fsQCA) to systematically examine the configurational pathways through which innovation borrowing leads to upward diffusion. The findings identify two pathways: the Policy Reproduction-Driven Pathway and the Diffusion Effect-Driven Pathway. The former features policy reproduction and provincial government support as core conditions, whereas the latter features cross-contextual characteristics and provincial government support as core conditions, with the scale of prior upward diffusion serving as a peripheral condition. This study extends the explanatory scope of policy transfer theory, provides a configurational explanation of how innovation borrowing leads to upward diffusion, and offers policy insights for mitigating excessive and repetitive policy innovation.

关键词：Innovation borrowing；upward diffusion；policy transfer；X-Chief Systems (XCS)

文献来源：JOURNAL OF ASIAN PUBLIC POLICY

wos链接：https://webofscience.clarivate.cn/wos/alldb/full-record/WOS:001842258900001