Sustainable pathways out of poverty: Evaluating the role of government-enterprise partnership in rural poverty alleviation in China

Poverty has been a global issue and a barrier to the achievement of Sustainable Development Goals. To reduce poverty, the Chinese government has implemented a variety of policies and made significant efforts. This study aims to explore the role of government-enterprise partnerships in poverty alleviation and compare the operating mechanisms and outcomes of different development models. By doing so, we selected three counties in China and conducted 41 in-depth interviews with diverse stakeholders, including peasant households, enterprise representatives, and government officials. We summarized three government-enterprise partnership development models in China—the direct employment model, the cooperative model, and the self-directed model—based on their operating mechanisms and outcomes. Due to differences in the operating mechanisms of the three models, the households showed different degrees of engagement and participation. In the short term, the direct employment model can be a direct and effective approach to lifting peasant households out of poverty, although with a relatively low degree of household engagement, while in the long term, the cooperative model and self-directed model with high degrees of engagement can better facilitate sustainable development. Our findings highlighted the significance of government-enterprise partnerships to alleviate poverty and accentuated the importance of community engagement to achieve sustainable development. Our study proposed a conceptual pathway of the government-enterprise partnership development model for poverty alleviation with three stages by integrating the three development models, which can guide future rural revitalization in China and poverty alleviation practices in other countries.