Review of the Researches on China􀆳s Ecological Environment Governance from the Perspective of Political Economics

Abstract

The issue of ecology and environment is not only a technical and economic issue, but also a political one. The literature on environmental governance from the perspective of political economy can be divided into four categories: the perspective of governance capabilities of local government, the perspective of local government competition, the perspective of “government-enterprise collusion”, and the perspective of power balance. These four types of literature generally show a change from the benevolent government hypothesis to a self-interested government, from a holistic methodology that takes local governments as the unit of analysis to an individualist methodology that takes individual officials as the object of research, a change from a focus on the superficial reasons such as the government's ability to governance and the effectiveness of the policy to deep-seated reasons such as the power structure of the pluralistic subjects of society. This paper argues that ecological environmental protection involves the interests of multiple subjects, but the imbalance in the distribution of power and the pattern of interests among the subjects, and the excessive power of local government to speak and the insufficient ability of the public to participate in society, has led to the distortion of the environmental protection system in its implementation. This is why there local government has been behind all the major environmental pollution incidents in the country in recent years, and why almost all environmental pollution problems are obvious violations of existing laws and regulations, rather than a lack of institutions. The “interest-power-institution” equilibrium perspective provides a powerful theoretical framework for a comprehensive understanding of the prevention and control of ecological damage.