Abstract: Policy-driving is one of the features of the standardized development of community governance in our country. A large number of community governance policy documents have been issued at the central and local levels， which forms the situation of city-encircling of policies. There is a dilemma of the public policy work in the community governance. On one hand， public policies play an important role in the standardization of community governance， such as clearing the concepts and goal orientation of community governance and building the macro systems and micro mechanisms of community governance. On the other hand， public policies also have some limits or even defects， such as policy failure because of the attributes of policies and lack of constraints to state powers because of excessive trust. To this end， the role of public policy in community governance needs to be repositioned. By incorporating principles or concepts of the rule of law， standardizing convergence and cooperation， and conducting policy evaluations， we can improve the quality of public policies in community governance， and thus walk out of city-circling of policies indeed.

Key words: rule of law, community governance, city-circling of policies, multiple norms