ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Public Health
Sec. Public Health Policy
Volume 13 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fpubh.2025.1666193
Towards A Framework of Ambiguity: A Qualitative Understanding of Healthcare Policy Design and Governance Mechanism in China
Provisionally accepted
- Donghua University College of Humanities, Shanghai, China
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This study explores the strategic and deliberate usage of ambiguity in Chinese public health policy as a governmental instrument. By analyzing 128 official public policy documents and 30 participant interviews as primary evidence, this study developed a three-tier coding instrument to capture the underlying categorizations, strategic functions, and behavioral responses. The findings of this study indicate that ambiguity, categorized into five types— “Elasticating”, “Generalizing”, “Overloading”, “Substituting”, and “Intensifying”—with “Elasticating” being the most predominant, facilitated the diffusion of accountability, the shifting of responsibility, and the flexibility of interpretation. This research makes a significant contribution to the field of public health governance by redefining policy ambiguity as a complex, integrated mechanism of problem-solving that is rooted in the behavioral, institutional, and bureaucratic contexts of public health operations in China, rather than as a systematic failure.
Keywords: public health policy, Strategic ambiguity, behavioral response, Health Governance, Health Systems
Received: 15 Jul 2025; Accepted: 06 Oct 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Qi, Hu and Huan. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Yuanbo Qi, y.qi@dhu.edu.cn
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