The actual operation of grassroots social governance is rarely driven by a single factor; rather, it is more often the result of the interplay among governance objectives, participation structures, organizational coordination, technical conditions, and government attention.Centering on this issue, this paper transforms the “co-governance structure based on self-governance” into a testable configurational framework. With 25 basic level social management cases from Southwestern China as the sample, this article utilizes a fuzzy set qualitative comparative analysis method to recognize the forming routes of high-level and non-high-level basic level cooperative governance. This research takes government attention degree, kinds of participating bodies, organization coordination, information technology level, and quantity of objectives as antecedent conditions, hence takes governance performance as the outcome variable. The results indicate that no single necessary condition for high-level governance exhibits a consistency exceeding 0.90, whereas low-participation actor types constitute a necessary background condition for non-high-level governance, with a consistency of 0.926667. The analysis of sufficient conditions identifies five high-level solutions, which can be grouped into three pathways: authority-driven, autonomy-driven, and technology-driven;The overall solution for high-level governance has a consistency of 0.976462 and a coverage of 0.855625. Further comparison reveals that the authority-driven path exhibits the highest discriminative power, the autonomy-driven path demonstrates the strongest internal stability, and the technology-driven path covers the largest number of cases; however, there is significant overlap among these paths. The contributions of this paper are placed in: bringing self-governance and collaborative governance into a unified configuration frame; giving a design which can verify the sample coding and calibration; and to carry out identification and presentation of the causal asymmetry in grassroots cooperative governance by means of a comparison between high-level and non-high-level governance.
