Community identity, empowerment, and willingness to co-produce: experimental evidence from urban China

Co-production is vital for effective urban governance, yet its drivers remain underexplored in China’s collectivist, state-led governance context, where prior studies overlook how individual and community factors jointly shape participation across co-production levels. This study investigates how residents’ community identity and community empowerment jointly influence three types of co-production (individual, group, and collective) using vignette-based experiments. Drawing on data from a tier-one city in China, we find that fostering community identity significantly enhances individual co-production but is insufficient to drive group and collective forms. In contrast, community empowerment emerges as a pivotal factor in promoting co-production at the group and collective levels. Notably, the motivation for group and collective co-production show no substantial differences. Situated in China’s urban grassroots governance context, these findings refine co-production theory by articulating a multi-level, level-contingent motivational framework. By demonstrating how different forms of co-production are underpinned by distinct motivational foundations, this study contributes to a more nuanced understanding of citizen engagement in state-led governance systems and offers policy-relevant insights for designing targeted strategies to mobilize diverse forms of co-production.