Abstract
From the perspective of environmental federalism, we extracted the environmental intention words from the work reports of China’s central and provincial governments through data mining, and used the instrumental variable method to conduct empirical experiments concerning the dispute between centralization and decentralization of environmental governance in the Chinese context. The results suggest that a negative correlation exists between the intention of the central government’s environmental governance and the provincial environmental quality, whereas a positive correlation exists between the intention of the provincial government and the provincial environmental quality. Our interpretation is that environmental centralization, coupled with its political, economic, and cultural factors, has converted provincial governments into supporters of environmental pollution, and that the central government’s ongoing environmental protection inspection campaign has forced the provincial government to be somewhat effective. We propose establishing Chinese-style cooperative federalism in environmental authority and not only centralizing or decentralizing in one direction. New transition mechanisms for the central government’s authority should be implemented, such as the environmental protection inspection groups mechanism and the ecological gross domestic product based political tournament.
Highlights
After three decades of rapid economic growth since the mid-1980s, China’s environmental pollution is becoming increasingly alarming
As China has maintained political centralization [3], the environmental governance is becoming increasingly centralized; according to environmental federalism, tension and certain ambivalence exist in environmental governance about the roles of the different levels of government [4]
This paper presents a theoretical review of the decentralization and centralization of environmental authority
Summary
After three decades of rapid economic growth since the mid-1980s, China’s environmental pollution is becoming increasingly alarming. According to the 2015 statistics of the Ministry of Environmental Protection [1], China’s annual economic losses due to environmental pollution and ecological destruction account for about 6% of its gross domestic product (GDP). Berkeley Earth, a California-based independent non-profit focusing on land temperature data analysis for climate science, published a study showing that around 1.6 million people in China die from PM2.5-related diseases each year, accounting for 17% of all deaths [2]. Aware of this severity, Chinese governments have attached increased importance to environmental governance since the 17th National Congress of the Communist Party of China. As Bednar [5] and Millimet [6] stated, the issue of environmental federalism is receiving widespread attention around the globe, determining the optimal allocation of environmental authority across levels of government remains a challenge
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