NGOs and Social Services in Rural China

Under the goal of building a “socialist harmonious society” (shehuizhuyi hexie shehui 社会主义和谐社会), the Chinese leadership pioneered a series of initiatives in the early 2000s to promote the development of the “social sector.” The demise of danwei-based welfare and the demand for better services drove innovation in service delivery models. The government purchase of social services and the development of the social work profession are parallel trends that unfolded in tandem under this policy context.

Contracting allows the outsourcing of certain state functions to civil society groups, and facilitates the re-articulation of state power through regulatory restructuring.Footnote ¹⁷ There are two main types of government purchase: the purchase of social worker “posts” (gangwei goumai 岗位购买) and the purchase of social work “projects” (xiangmu goumai 项目购买). The former refers to the purchase of the services of individual social workers who are recruited to social service organizations on a contract basis. The latter refers to the outsourcing of welfare programmes to social service organizations. For example, an NGO can be contracted to provide services to a particular social group in a neighbourhood. In some localities, government purchase extends to an entire service centre at the shequ (community) level, where the NGO is furnished with funding to develop programmes for different client groups in the community. In these cases, the service agencies are often directly involved in grassroots administration and community governance.

The expansion of government purchase facilitated the development of the social work profession in China. Social work was introduced into China as an academic discipline in the early 20th century. Following the establishment of the People's Republic of China, it was labelled a “bourgeois pseudo-science” and removed from university curriculums.Footnote ¹⁸ The discipline was reintroduced in the 1980s to tackle the plethora of social issues arising from market reform. In 2008, MOCA took charge of coordinating the social work industry and expedited its professionalization by setting benchmarks for the training, examination and registration of social workers.Footnote ¹⁹ Rather than being government workers, the earliest social workers are mostly employees of social service organizations, the number of which grew rapidly with the increase in service contracting by state agencies.

While the majority of social service providers can be found in urban areas, there was an emerging consensus in the early 2000s that the Chinese countryside was confronted with grave challenges that demanded policy attention. Under market reform, the out-migration of the able-bodied population from rural areas hollowed out Chinese villages and created large populations of the “left behind.” The decline of agriculture and later rural industries created fiscal shortfalls and undermined the ability of rural governments to guarantee basic public goods. The rural welfare system – including the provision of basic subsistence assistance, cooperative medical care and rural old-age insurance – was at risk of collapse. The levying of heavy taxes and fees by cash-strapped local states further exacerbated the “peasant burden” and eroded relations between cadres and villagers, leading to a rise in peasant protests at the turn of the century.

In light of these issues, some NGOs and social workers began organizing services for rural communities. Notable examples include Pingzhai 平寨 village in Yunnan province, where academics and social workers partnered with a Hong Kong university to support development in an ethnic minority village.Footnote ²⁰ Using a capacity-building approach, the Pingzhai project emphasized the mobilization of community resources and the development of social economy through the creation of rural cooperatives and fostering of rural–urban networks. In Xiangxi 湘西, Hunan province, social workers from Changsha Social Work College pioneered the establishment of a community service station, developed rural cooperatives and organized welfare programmes for the “left-behind” population.Footnote ²¹

Three developments accounted for the party-state's enlarged role in rural social service provision and the expansion of government purchase from urban to rural areas. First, the launch of the New Socialist Countryside (Shehuizhuyi xinnongcun 社会主义新农村) campaign marked a new stage in the government's involvement in rural modernization and urbanization. In its “No. 1 Central Document” for 2006, the central government lay down key directions for moving rural areas towards modernity and “moderate prosperity in all aspects” (quanmian xiaokang 全面小康).Footnote ²² “Rural community building” (nongcun shequ jianshe 农村社区建设) was promoted, along with the development of “new-type management and service systems” for these neighbourhoods.Footnote ²³ In 2007, MOCA selected 304 counties as pilot sites for new rural construction. These initiatives not only saw the extension of urban planning principles to rural areas, they also remodelled city-based systems of social work and service provision in the new rural communities. Wanzai 万载 county in Jiangxi province, one of the pilot sites selected by MOCA, serves as an example. The Wanzai government played a direct role in supervising the building of rural social work stations through issuing work plans, providing funding and setting performance targets, while social service organizations were mobilized to play a supportive role as service providers.Footnote ²⁴

Second, the need to build capacity for disaster relief – following a series of devastating natural disasters including the 2008 Wenchuan 汶川 earthquake – helped expedite the extension of social work services to rural areas. Prior to the Wenchuan earthquake, social work training in China did not include intervention in disaster-affected communities.Footnote ²⁵ The role of social work in post-disaster reconstruction has evolved rapidly thereafter. In the 2013 Ya'an 雅安 earthquake, for example, state agencies worked extensively with NGOs to carry out joint relief missions.Footnote ²⁶ The involvement of social workers and social organizations in relief work not only increased official recognition for their role in rural construction, it also strengthened organizational ties between the government and welfare-oriented NGOs.

Poverty alleviation provided the third policy context for greater engagement between state agencies and social workers in rural development. In 2013, President Xi Jinping coined the term “targeted poverty alleviation” to highlight the importance of social assistance reaching households and individuals in need. The government then issued a document entitled “Decisions on Winning the Battle of Poverty Eradication” (Guanyu daying tuopin gongjianzhan de jueding 关于打赢脱贫攻坚战的决定) in 2015, which spelled out the goal of lifting 70 million rural residents above the poverty line by 2020. The document called for the extensive mobilization of “social forces” (shehui liliang 社会力量) to participate in anti-poverty efforts, specifically volunteers and professional social workers.Footnote ²⁷

The Strategic Plan for Rural Revitalization (2018–2022) represents the latest initiative in which the extension of social work services to rural China was emphasized. Local governments were encouraged to purchase services from NGOs and create more positions for professional social workers in rural areas.Footnote ²⁸ These developments augur the state's enlarged role in rural social work and welfare provision. In the rest of the paper, we examine how this restructures relations between the state and NGOs through a longitudinal case study.

Case and Methodology

Guangdong is one of the leading provinces in social service innovation. Its provincial capital, Guangzhou, began experimenting with the government purchase of social services as early as 2007. Between 2008 and 2016, the Guangzhou municipal government spent over 1.7 billion yuan in the purchase of social work services. Most of these contracts were taken up by social service organizations in the city, whose number stood at 417 as of 2016.Footnote ²⁹

Our case study represents the first case of government service purchase for rural communities in Guangzhou.Footnote ³⁰ In 2009, the municipal bureau of civil affairs launched a purchase programme that included 33 projects in Guangzhou. While the rest of the projects were based in urban areas, our case study involved servicing two impoverished villages located in the mountainous north-eastern part of the city. The bureau purchased services from an NGO called Centre for Sustainability (hereafter CFS). Formally registered in 2009 under the Guangdong provincial department of civil affairs, CFS has worked extensively with rural communities in Yunnan and Sichuan since the early 2000s with an emphasis on fair trade, rural–urban cooperation and sustainable development. The NGO gained nationwide recognition for its collaboration with the Guangdong government in providing post-disaster relief in the 2008 Wenchuan earthquake.

As a pioneering case of government purchase of social services for rural communities, the civil affairs bureau signed a three-year contract with CFS wherein it provided an annual funding of 1 million yuan to the NGO for developing welfare programmes. The contract was subsequently renewed twice at three-year intervals, until 2019 when the purchase arrangement was terminated. Our research period covers eleven years, from 2009 when the service contract began, to early 2020, when social workers were wrapping up their project at the end of the decade-long engagement.

Field visits and interviews were used to collect data. A total of 22 visits was made by the authors to the villages between 2009 and 2020, with each visit lasting approximately five days. The visits provided opportunities for data collection through interviews and informal conversations, as well as direct participant observation through taking part in activities and work meetings. We observed the interaction between social workers, villagers and local officials to make sense of the evolving dynamics. The interviews cited in this paper were conducted between 2019 and 2021 with social workers from CFS (n=7) and villagers (n=20). We also collected documentary data in the form of annual reports published by CFS and reflection reports written by social workers.

Developing Social Work Services in Two Guangdong Villages

The CFS project was carried out in two impoverished rural communities at the north-eastern fringe of Guangzhou. Fairydale and Sunshine are natural villages (ziran cun 自然村) about 2.5 hours by car from Guangzhou city centre. Located in a mountainous region, the villages have no direct access to public transportation. The nearest township is a 45-minute car ride away. Fairydale has a population of 400 while Sunshine has a population of 750. The majority of the population engage in non-agricultural employment in nearby towns or in Guangzhou city centre. Only a quarter of the population normally resides in the villages.

A total of twelve social workers were involved in the CFS project between 2009 and 2020. Most of them took up residence in the villages and stayed for three to four years. Born in the 1980s and 1990s, many of the social workers were non-local migrants who had moved to Guangzhou for study or work. Some were raised in rural areas while others grew up in cities. Their employment with CFS was their first or second job after graduation. They were paid a monthly salary of 2,700 yuan, with annual incremental raises based on performance and experience.Footnote ³¹ Senior social workers were paid around 5,000 yuan per month.Footnote ³² Approximately 40 per cent of the project's 1-million-yuan funding was used to support social workers’ remuneration, while the remaining 60 per cent was spent on operational expenses.Footnote ³³

Compared to urban areas where social services often target specific groups, rural social workers commonly station in one community for an extended period where they are expected to serve multiple groups and address a broad range of issues. Living in the village meant that there were no clear boundaries between work and personal space.Footnote ³⁴ Rural residents tend to be less familiar with what social work is about. At the beginning of the CFS project, villagers in Fairydale and Sunshine were unsure of why social workers had come to live in their village. Some thought they were university students doing research in the community, while others saw them as government workers on assignment from the civil affairs bureau. “When the project began, villagers did not understand who we were. They might adopt a very simplistic view and saw us as either being on the government's side or on their side,” one social worker remarked.Footnote ³⁵ Another challenge stemmed from the complex social relations and interpersonal dynamics at the village level. Social workers – being recent university graduates – often had to navigate intricate family ties and kinship dynamics on their own.

Social workers pursued a number of strategies in building relationships with the villagers. They conducted regular home visits and interviews to assess community needs and identified villagers who could be potential clients. They then worked with these villagers to develop programmes that were tailored to the needs of specific groups.

Social workers credited the autonomy they were given as an important factor for their efficacy. Although the project was undertaken under a government purchase arrangement, social workers were given few instructions or guidelines from the government in terms of how the programme should be run. As one staff member remarked, “Nobody had done rural social work before. The government gave us a lot of freedom to develop this project because they did not know what could be achieved. We designed the content of the service contract based on the developmental goals of our own organization.”Footnote ³⁶ This autonomy allowed social workers to create welfare programmes that aligned with CFS's values: promoting sustainable rural development through capacity building, grassroots empowerment and rural–urban partnership.

One of the first initiatives CFS piloted in Fairydale targeted “left-behind” women – women whose spouses are regularly away for work for an extended period. Many of them had no work in the village and were dependent on their husbands’ remittances for a living. The social workers found eight interested women and organized them into a mutual aid group in 2010. Observing that traditional village houses could be refurbished and developed into accommodation for visitors, social workers helped coordinate the renovation and started a guesthouse business. The women were responsible for preparing meals and lodging for visitors, who were charged 130–150 yuan per night of stay. Using their contact networks with local NGOs and universities, social workers helped organize group tours to Fairydale which generated 180,000–250,000 yuan in annual revenues for the mutual aid group. On average members received a monthly income of 1,000–2,000 yuan, which was a significant amount for the women and their families.Footnote ³⁷ One member indicated that earnings from the group gave her greater financial security and autonomy as she no longer relied solely on money sent by her husband.Footnote ³⁸

Another initiative targeted farmers in the villages. There are small areas of farmland in Fairydale and Sunshine and some villagers made a living from cash crop cultivation. Due to the lack of scale, however, villagers seldom made enough from farming alone and had to work multiple jobs to make ends meet. Social workers from CFS mobilized a group of green plum farmers to form a producer cooperative. The cooperative provided a platform for farmers to divide their labour and distribute their products more efficiently through a uniform channel. Social workers used their social media skills to market the products and tapped into their own networks to identify buyers and outlets. The cooperative successfully generated 220,000 yuan in annual revenues in its third year of operation, which further peaked at 470,000 yuan in 2018. Our interviews found that income from the cooperative allowed some villagers to leave their jobs in the cities and move back home.Footnote ³⁹

The agential role of CFS in designing the content of the service contract not only enabled it to address the community's specific needs, it also allowed the NGO to practise and promote its organizational mission. Through training and education, villagers came to gain identification with the values of mutual help, community support and sustainable development that CFS champions. In 2018, for example, a group of villagers started a field school out of their own initiative and formed a partnership arrangement with another NGO.Footnote ⁴⁰ Members of the cooperatives also agreed to form a charity fund to support community welfare. Ten per cent of each cooperative's profits accrued to the fund, which was used to subsidize village-wide celebrations, the building and repair of public facilities, and ecological initiatives such as tree planting. In 2018, the charity funds in Fairydale and Sunshine accumulated a combined total of 32,000 yuan.Footnote ⁴¹

The autonomy afforded to CFS meant that social workers were more than service providers. The staff interviewed described themselves as a “bridge” between the community and external networks and as “change makers.” From bringing in visitors to identifying distribution channels for farm products, social workers made use of their own networks and skills to support the initiatives. More than just implementing welfare programmes, they also promoted their visions and invested time and effort in training up core villagers to take over leadership responsibilities. Following the dictum of “helping people to help themselves,” CFS gradually shifted from playing a leading role in community welfare to playing a supportive role.Footnote ⁴² For social workers, the success of the project lay precisely in the bottom-up empowerment of the community.

State–NGO Relations in Rural Areas: Comparisons with Urban Areas

The autonomy enjoyed by CFS in the early stages of the contract stood in contrast to findings in the literature that suggest a much lower level of agency on the part of service providers. Existing studies generally found that while government purchase expands the room for social organizations to participate in service provision and grassroots governance, many remained constrained by refined tactics of state control.Footnote ⁴³ Strategies deployed by the government include registration requirements, financial regulation, soft co-optation through legitimacy-sharing initiatives, and the fostering of fiscal dependence through competitive bidding.Footnote ⁴⁴ Local governments have also introduced ranking and auditing to measure NGO performance as a way of incentivizing compliance.Footnote ⁴⁵

In our case study, the novelty of social work services for rural areas created a unique context for policy flexibility and professional input. As Hasmath and Hsu point out in their study of state-NGO relations in Beijing and Shanghai, epistemic awareness on the part of the government is directly related to its ability and desire to interact with non-profits.Footnote ⁴⁶ In an emerging organizational field where rules and restrictions are still evolving, social actors have more space to proactively pursue opportunities and even circumvent restrictions within relatively flexible institutional settings.Footnote ⁴⁷ This can be observed when we compare the state's regulatory role in supervising service providers in urban and rural areas.

In urban areas, the city of Guangzhou pioneered the establishment of community service centres at the street or sub-district (jiedao 街道) level to provide targeted social work services for the local neighbourhood. Known as Integrated Family Service Centres (Jiating zonghe fuwu zhongxin 家庭综合服务中心) (hereafter IFSCs), these centres usually involve the purchase of services from social organizations by the street-level government, with funding provided by municipal and district finance bureaus. As of 2014, there were 79 different social service agencies operating 171 IFSCs across Guangzhou.Footnote ⁴⁸ To strengthen its managerial role as the service demander, the municipal government has developed a standard repertoire of assessment criteria by which service providers are appraised. Many of these involve quantitative performance indicators that are uniformly applied to all neighbourhoods across the city.Footnote ⁴⁹

Studies on IFSCs have found that government officials often treat service providers as “foot soldiers” and “servant[s] of government departments,” rather than as independent organizations.Footnote ⁵⁰ The provision of professional services by NGOs has been disrupted both by the discharging of administrative work to NGOs and by ill-designed evaluation standards that do not reflect the needs of communities. Street governments tend to outsource administrative duties to service providers, who find it hard to resist demands imposed from above.Footnote ⁵¹ The extensive use of quantitative performance indicators also work more to the advantage of government officials in terms of showcasing their achievements, rather than to facilitate genuine community impact.Footnote ⁵²

The NGO in our case study enjoyed a much higher degree of autonomy in its provision of rural social work services. CFS was not free from government monitoring. Like service providers in urban areas, the NGO had to submit monthly work reports to the district civil affairs bureau. Social workers were required to make in-person visits to the bureau every three months to report their work.Footnote ⁵³ Officials from the civil affairs bureau carried out site visits at Fairydale and Sunshine every six months to evaluate work progress. Aside from monitoring by the government, CFS was also assessed by a third party identified through competitive bidding, in this case professionals from Guangzhou University's Department of Social Work.

In contrast to service agencies under the IFSC model, however, social workers at CFS had a greater say in determining how their work should be appraised. They were directly involved in the setting of performance targets in their evaluation. As one social worker remarked: “There hadn't been any other organization providing rural social work services before us. We enjoyed a substantial level of autonomy in terms of setting targets and plans based on what we wanted to achieve and what we could feasibly achieve…There were no established standards to follow so we created them.”Footnote ⁵⁴ In designing the evaluation, social workers avoided the output-oriented approach that characterizes the IFSC model. “We seldom include quantifiable targets like those adopted by IFSCs, which require social workers to form a certain number of small groups, organize a certain number of activities, or develop a certain number of cases,” said one social worker. “Our targets have more to do with organizing and training villagers, such as providing learning opportunities for them.”Footnote ⁵⁵ The freedom to tailor their performance criteria to the values and missions of CFS facilitated their goal of improving livelihoods through capacity building, grassroots empowerment and sustainable rural–urban partnership.

At the village level, social workers also reported a generally non-interventionist attitude on the part of the village government. In both Fairydale and Sunshine, social workers did not encounter pressure to perform administrative duties, although they were asked to provide assistance to rural cadres in implementing certain policy initiatives, such as state-led campaigns to improve village sanitation and demolish illegal buildings.Footnote ⁵⁶ In Fairydale, CFS was approached by the villagers’ committee with a request to be allocated a portion of government funding for implementing parts of the project. The village government was given 150,000 yuan to assist in the refurbishment of lineage halls and some traditional houses. Following this initial engagement, social workers did not have much interaction with rural officials except in activities organized by CFS, which the officials were invited to attend. In Sunshine, social workers had more frequent interactions with the village government. The election of a young village leader facilitated communication. The two sides agreed to convert part of the villagers’ committee building into a public space for CFS to host communal activities. CFS paid a rental fee to the villagers’ committee to use the space. Social workers also established good rapport with members of the village government, including the vice-chairperson and women's representative, who were frequent participants in activities organized by CFS.Footnote ⁵⁷

The non-interventionist attitude of the village government can be explained by two factors. First, because the service purchaser was the municipal government, rather than the township or village government, the lower-level authorities played a smaller managerial role in the case of CFS. In some contracting arrangements, township and village governments were the direct purchaser of services. In those cases, township and village officials tended to discharge more administrative tasks to NGOs and supervise social workers more closely because they were the party paying for the services.Footnote ⁵⁸ Secondly, compared with their counterparts in urban areas, village governments in more remote rural areas tend to be of smaller scale and have fewer resources. The villagers’ committee and village Party branch in Fairydale and Sunshine had only a small number of staff, with around five active members who also had side jobs in the city and were not around in the village every day. Because they themselves had a smaller administrative workload, rural officials were less likely to have to request support from social workers.Footnote ⁵⁹

Overall, social workers from CFS believed that they were given more independence and were evaluated by relatively “relaxed” standards when compared with NGOs in urban areas.Footnote ⁶⁰ The comparatively small role played by the local state at different levels allowed social workers to set their own assessment criteria and generally freed them from the pressure to perform administrative duties. As the next section shows, this opportunity structure was to shift towards the later stages of the project.

Changing Approaches in Service Delivery: Towards State Incorporation?

From the mid-2010s, following the signing of their third contract with the civil affairs bureau, social workers at CFS observed a number of changes that indicated the government's shifting approach in monitoring service providers. To begin with, assessment by the government took on a more standardized (guifanhua 规范化) format that was directly appropriated from IFSCs in Guangzhou's urban areas. The adoption of the urban-based model imposed new measurements and targets that social workers felt were not applicable in the village context. “Government evaluation became much more regularized in the last three to four years of our project,” observed one social worker. “We found it difficult because there are many differences between the provision of social work services in urban and rural areas.”Footnote ⁶¹

There was also growing pressure from the government for social workers to assist in Party-building (dangjian 党建) efforts.Footnote ⁶² Starting from 2018, social workers in the CFS project were expected to include Party-building in their work, and would lose points in their appraisals if this was not carried out. The inclusion of the new requirement was part of the government's initiative to enlist NGOs to participate in Party work. In 2018, Guangdong province issued a three-year action plan to strengthen Party-building in grassroots organizations.Footnote ⁶³ The document called for reinforcing the political leadership of Party cells in social service organizations, and for mobilizing social forces to participate in rural revitalization, targeted poverty alleviation and grassroots governance in a way that would buttress the organizational capacity and leadership of the Party. Following the publication of the action plan, the Guangzhou municipal government incorporated Party-building as a standard requirement into its performance assessment of all social service organizations. All service providers were rated on whether they had Party members in their staff, and if they had established an internal Party cell and organized activities that promoted the Party such as study sessions. Social workers in CFS found the requirement “unreasonable” and did not engage in Party work. As a result, points were deducted from their evaluation.Footnote ⁶⁴ The NGO did not have an internal Party cell to begin with, and because the purchase arrangement was coming to an end CFS did not feel compelled to comply with the new requirement.Footnote ⁶⁵

Aside from imposing new standards and requirements, the government's overall approach towards rural welfare provision was beginning to change. Whereas projects in the early stages of development involved mainly small-scale pilot schemes in villages and townships, higher-level authorities are now coordinating policy campaigns on a larger scale. The most prominent example was the shuangbai scheme (shuangbai jihua 双百计划), launched by the Guangdong provincial department of civil affairs in 2017. The campaign involved building social work service stations in 200 townships across the province, with the aim of creating 1,000 new positions for professional social workers and incubating 200 social service organizations. Shuangbai was later expanded to 407 townships, targeting less developed areas such as Shaoguan 韶关 and Qingyuan 清远 in the north, Meizhou 梅州 and Heyuan 河源 in the east, and Yunfu 云浮 and Maoming 茂名 in the west. Some townships in the Pearl River Delta cities of Dongguan 东莞, Zhongshan 中山 and Zhuhai 珠海 were also included.

The CFS project in Fairydale and Sunshine became a training base for social workers who were recruited under shuangbai. Starting from 2017, government officials, project coordinators and social workers affiliated with the campaign conducted regular study tours to the villages and attended sharing sessions prepared by social workers and villagers on CFS's work in Fairydale and Sunshine. Although the CFS project was held up as a pioneering model of rural social work services, shuangbai in fact adopts a very different approach in service delivery in terms of the role of the state and social workers.

First, unlike earlier pilots which involved lower-level authorities, shuangbai was directly supervised and managed by the provincial government. It was described as minsheng gongcheng 民生工程, a campaign led by the state aimed at improving people's livelihoods.Footnote ⁶⁶ Under the leadership of the provincial department of civil affairs, coordination centres were set up at the municipal level, which in turn oversaw welfare programmes in townships under their jurisdiction. Funding for shuangbai came from civil affairs bureaus at the provincial, municipal and county levels, with the provincial department providing an annual budget of 17 million yuan for social work training and 12 million yuan for programmes implemented by social work service stations.Footnote ⁶⁷

Shuangbai also diverged from the practice of service contracting via NGOs by directly hiring social workers on a contract basis. This restructured the relationship between the state, NGOs and social workers in service delivery. Under earlier contracting arrangements, the government purchased social services from a particular organization which then coordinated its own staff to carry out services. In the CFS project, for example, the NGO made its own decision regarding the design of programmes and deployment of personnel, while the government, as the service purchaser, was mainly involved as a regulator and evaluator. Under shuangbai, the state plays a direct role in hiring and programme design. The township government of each project site is responsible for recruiting social workers to staff the community service stations. Rather than being employees of existing NGOs, these social workers work for the government on a contract basis and report immediately to government agencies. They are also required to go through a standardized training programme designed by the provincial department of civil affairs.

The top-down nature of shuangbai is further reflected in the adoption of standardized practice models across the hundreds of service centres being built. Instead of a case-based (zhuan'an 专案) approach, where social workers develop tailor-made programmes based on the specific needs and assets of the communities, shuangbai is more concerned with innovating a comprehensive system (tixi 体系) for carrying out rural social work services that can be replicated in villages and townships across the entire province.Footnote ⁶⁸ It adopts what a social worker described as an “administrative-led” approach where the thousands of social workers employed under the scheme received uniform training and instruction on how to engage with the different neighbourhoods they are stationed in.Footnote ⁶⁹

Shuangbai projects are characterized by a uniform emphasis on service provision. In social work projects where the government purchases services from NGOs, the involvement of different social service organizations with distinct organizational values implies greater diversity in terms of how services are designed and carried out. In the CFS project, for example, the NGO's capacity-building method and emphasis on rural–urban sustainability directly shaped its work in Fairydale and Sunshine, as seen in the establishment of rural cooperatives and promotion of eco-farming. By contrast, shuangbai is more singularly focused on improving service delivery and enhancing grassroots governance, objectives that are in line with the portfolio of the civil affairs department.Footnote ⁷⁰ Social workers are usually tasked with performing more administrative duties for the village government.