Abstract:

Building a community governance community is an inevitable choice to address challenges such as complex interest relations and diversified risks. Given their unique advantages, social workers can be an important force in promoting the construction of community governance communities. Based on an analysis of governance practices in Hangzhou City’s Xihu District, this paper examines the construction of community governance communities through social workers. We found the action strategy driving this effort lies in building a comprehensive support and cultivation system, enabling them to promote the construction of interactive networks, as well as the infiltration of professionalism, the achievement of collective actions, and the optimization and reshaping of community governance structures through the step-by-step embedding of “relationships-structures-actions”. This process balances the social workers’ “embeddedness” and their professionalism. It also stimulates the participation awareness, internal potential and cooperative vitality of various governance subjects. This process has achieved the “integration” of value goals, governance resources, governance businesses, and subject relationships, so that community governance communities can be built up. This idea provides inspiration for promoting the formation of a “co-construction, co-sharing, and co-governance” pattern in communities.

Key words: social governance modernization, community governance community, social workers, urban community governance