Why Do Innovations Succeed or Fail? Local Anti-Corruption Reform in China*

Local innovations have proliferated in China in recent years. The huge universe of local initiatives results from economic and administrative decentralization. Various challenges facing China's unprecedented market-driven reform invite innovative solutions as well. What happens to the innovations after they were launched? Are they institutionalized locally and diffused nationwide? Or do they merely perform the function of window dressing and fail to achieve anything? Drawing on in-depth case studies of local anti-corruption reform, this article attempts to address these questions. It offers a two-dimensional conceptual framework of institutionalization and diffusion to examine what has happened to locally initiated anti-corruption measures. On that basis, a fourfold classification of innovation trajectories is identified to help explain why some innovations have suceeded while others failed. The findings indicate that local innovations have different developmental trajectories not so much because of their internal characteristics but because of the contextual constraints they face. Policy innovation is more of a process of political construction than a process of selecting better policy tools. This may be particularly true for anti-corruption reform that, as our cases show, requires strong political will, public embracement, and legal support.