Abstract: From the project perspective, the collaborative governance mechanism of the project is described, and an evolutionary game model is used to study public and private sectors decision-making process in the long-term provision process of public cultural services with and without public participation. The results show that the value of governance gains, speculative gains and public penalties are the key to influence the public and private sectors to choose the ESS. The logical conflicts which are the national dominant versus the local autonomy, and the bureaucratic performance-oriented versus the demand-oriented are described through the case analysis. The following countermeasures are proposed:increasing the profitable attributes of public cultural services, optimizing the way of government subsidies, introducing public supervision mechanism, enhancing the supervision awareness of the public, increasing the intensity of penalties and raising governance gains.

Key words: public culture, project system, collaborative governance, evolutionary game