关键词: 地方政府, 民间慈善会, 治理权, 制度建构, 内在机理

Abstract: The development of sustainable operational capacity of county-level charitable organizations at the intersection of state governance structures and local social networks offers an important lens for understanding state–society relations in grassroots governance. Existing studies frequently adopt frameworks of philanthropic property rights, principal–agent relations, or interest-based bargaining among actors. These approaches tend to reduce local charity associations either to technical vehicles for managing charitable assets or to isolated arenas of internal organizational governance, thus failing to explain the formation of organizational authority and the sustained production of public legitimacy. This article reflects on the limitations of the above explanations and proposes an analytical framework of “governance authority of social organizations.” Governance authority refers to an institutionalized configuration of rights, responsibilities, and capacities grounded in social recognition. Through the organizational platform of the charity association, governance authority enables community members to acquire structured positions within local governance arrangements, thereby allowing the organization to mobilize resources, coordinate social relations, and produce public legitimacy. Governance authority is characterized by three attributes: social recognition, embeddedness, and functionality. Based on a case study of the charity association in County J of Province F, this study finds that the association relies on the local socio-cultural ecology and a socialized philanthropic network to establish the social foundations for grassroots collaborative governance. Through institutional embedding, structural incorporation, and procedural deliberation, it continuously generates and reconfigures a more inclusive and dynamic mechanism of cooperation, thereby aligning local governance objectives with organizational action. In effect, the activation and operation of governance authority reshape local rights-responsibilities arrangements and facilitate the evolution of grassroots governance configurations. By revealing the mechanisms through which governance authority is constructed, operates, and develops, this study advances understanding of how grassroots governance order is formed in a period of social transformation.

Key words: local government, civil charitable associations, governance rights, institutional construction, internal mechanisms