Environmental Collaborative Governance Degree of Government, Corporation, and Public

Xin Duan,Rui Yang,Shengli Dai,Ziwei Duan,Yanhong Tang

doi:10.3390/su12031138

Abstract

The Chinese government has attached great importance to environmental collaborative governance recently to cope with rising pollution problems. How to measure environmental collaborative governance degree is a key issue to evaluate the level and progress of the implementation of this great ambition. This paper designs an index system for measuring environmental collaborative governance degree, covering dimensions of government, corporation and the public. The entropy method is applied to measure the change of environmental governance capacity. The coupling coordination model is adapted to evaluate the environmental collaborative governance degree of government–corporation–public. Empirical analysis is conducted by using the panel data of 30 provinces of China for the years 2006–2015. The results are provided and discussed from various dimensions. Suggestions are put forward accordingly. This paper focuses on developing a method for measuring environmental collaborative governance degree and is meaningful for enlightening future research about the effect of collaboration on environmental governance.

Highlights

Environmental governance has been given great importance due to the increasing serious pollution problems in China [1,2]
Local government is responsible for the local environment, supervising local environmental investment and manning quotas of local environmental protection departments; namely, the “regional governance” [6,7,8]
The results show that environmental governance level of government in the four regions during the period experienced an upward trend

Summary

Introduction

Environmental governance has been given great importance due to the increasing serious pollution problems in China [1,2]. Since the 1970s, China’s environmental governance system has established and formed the hierarchical governance by longitudinal and transverse subsectors, namely “vertical and regional” dual leadership system (see Figure 1) [1,2,3,4,5]. It is a government-led environmental governance system. Local governments managed the personnel and finance of the local environmental protection departments (see Figure 1). It is understandable that the profits of local governments and environmental protection departments at different levels are sometimes at conflict. This situation results in commissioned-agent relationship and various constrains on local environmental protection departments

Results

Discussion

Conclusion