Bridging Public Services Co-Production: Exploring the Roles of NGOs in Ecological Governance and Rural Revitalization in China

While co-production theory is deeply rooted in Western democratic norms, its applicability to state-centric regimes with managed participation and constrained civil society remains under-theorized. Addressing this gap, this study examines how an environmental NGO facilitates co-production in China’s Guanba Nature Reserve. Integrating Ostrom’s multi-level ecosystem framework with Social Network Analysis, we reveal that co-production here is not a static arrangement but a dynamic evolutionary process. Acting as a strategic “boundary spanner,” the NGO orchestrates resource flows and translates state imperatives into community-led actions, propelling engagement from an initial material-driven phase, through value evolution, to institutional lock-in. Our findings demonstrate the successful transfer of bridging and linking social capital to indigenous actors, converting passive recipients into active co-producers—a process we term “intermediated participation.” This study advances co-production theory by revealing context-dependent engagement pathways and provides a novel framework for understanding participatory governance beyond Western-centric models.