Abstract
This paper aims to examine the changing factors underlying China’s environmental governance, by investigating the long-term dynamic impacts of related endogenous and exogenous factors and considering regional differences in these factors. The study estimated environmental regulation intensity and employed the geographical detector technique to analyze its driving factors, based on 21 prefecture-level cities in Guangdong Province, China, from 1990 to 2016. The results showed that environmental regulation intensity has increased in Guangdong Province over the past 27 years. The results also indicated that local environmental governance was affected by global–local interactions and changed based on different regional developmental phases. At first, factors within a region affected local environmental policies more significantly, such as economic development and urbanization. However, in the long run, globalization’s impacts have been the most important factors influencing environmental governance. Further analysis showed that environmental regulation intensity in Guangdong Province’s different regions was affected by different driven factors. Our analyses contribute to the understanding of China’s environmental governance and have policy implications for environmental problem management and China’s construction of an ecological civilization.
Highlights
After China’s reform and opening up, the country faced an unprecedented economic boost that made it the largest developing country in the world [1]
Unlike existing research, which is limited to national-level data, this paper examined Guangdong Province by disaggregating it into two regions, developed and developing, to introduce some nuance and geographical understanding into the research regarding factors influencing local environmental governance in the Chinese context
With GDP (0.4279) and that of ITEM with open ports (OPEN) (0.4238) had the strongest explanatory power for environmental regulation intensity (ER), suggesting the interactions among globalization, economic growth, and other factors were the most impactful for environmental governance in the cities of Guangdong Province. These results further demonstrate that local environmental governance was affected by interactions among multiple endogenous and exogenous factors
Summary
After China’s reform and opening up, the country faced an unprecedented economic boost that made it the largest developing country in the world [1]. Such extensive development came at the cost of remarkable resource consumption, which exacerbated the deterioration of the ecological environment [2,3]. In recent years, a series of environmental policies and measures based on local features has been undertaken by the Chinese government. Following the trend of neoliberalization in most developed countries, the government’s role has weakened, while non-state actors have had more opportunities to influence environmental governance [6,7]. In contrast with the Western model of neoliberal governance, which emphasizes
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