Strategic compliance: How local governments reshape social housing mandates in China's pro-growth planning regime

In contrast to the shrinkage of social housing in most advanced economies, China's central government (re)initiated a large-scale new-generation social house-building programme following the global financial crisis. Local governments were tasked with fulfilling centrally-determined production quotas to stimulate economic recovery. This study examines the implementation of these mandates in Shanghai, revealing how local authorities strategically reinterpret central directives to align with pro-growth agendas. Drawing on interviews with government officials, planners, and academics, alongside policy document analysis, this research demonstrates how local governments engage in ‘strategic compliance’ – fulfilling central mandates while systematically transforming their purposes to serve local development objectives – through three key planning practices. First, authorities exploit policy ambiguities to repurpose social housing quotas for urban renewal-related resettlement. Second, they deploy social housing developments as instruments for metropolitan restructuring and new town development. Third, district governments select sites to protect land revenue potential by relegating social housing to peripheral and compromised locations. By integrating fragmented authoritarianism, state entrepreneurialism, and developmental welfare perspectives, we reveal how institutional conditions, operational logics, and normative frameworks interact to enable this strategic compliance. While these strategies facilitate local growth objectives, they often undermine the policy's original intent of accommodating the most vulnerable populations, instead contributing to the government-driven suburbanisation of disadvantaged groups. This article explains how suboptimal housing outcomes emerge not from implementation failures but from local policy entrepreneurship within China's pro-growth planning regime and offers insights into the challenges of implementing top-down social policies in decentralised urban contexts. • Local governments strategically reinterpret social housing mandates while maintaining formal compliance with central directives • Three practices enable policy transformation: quota reinterpretation, metropolitan spatial strategy, and district-level site optimisation • Strategic compliance emerges from the interaction of fragmented authoritarianism, state entrepreneurialism, and developmental welfare frameworks • Social housing implementation undermines original policy intent, contributing to government-driven suburbanisation of disadvantaged groups • Local implementation reshapes central welfare policies into instruments for urban development within pro-growth planning systems