Determinants of policy innovation diffusion in China’s provincial sports industry funds: A mixed-methods analysis of strategic adaptation and institutional constraint

Existing policy-diffusion theories emphasize economic capacity, market maturity, and intergovernmental pressure, yet these factors may operate differently in specialized industrial policies. This study examines the diffusion of provincial sports industry development funds in China through a mixed-methods design combining discrete-time event history analysis of 31 provincial-level administrative regions from 2006 to 2022 with thematic analysis of 30 stakeholder interviews. The results show that fiscal self-sufficiency and sports lottery sales are positively associated with policy adoption, underscoring the importance of fiscal discretion and policy-specific resources. By contrast, the number of sports enterprises is negatively associated with adoption, contrary to the hypothesized positive relationship and consistent with a tentative compensatory interpretation in which dedicated funds respond to perceived industrial weakness. Administrative pressure is significant in several reduced models but not in the fully specified model, suggesting that national directives shape the institutional context without independently determining provincial adoption timing. Interview findings further reveal how strategic resource allocation, symbolic responses to public demand, formal compliance, and selective policy adaptation mediate the translation of policy conditions into local action. Together, the findings advance a context-sensitive account of diffusion organized around resource specificity, compensatory intervention, and strategic local translation, thereby identifying important boundary conditions of conventional policy-diffusion explanations.