Understanding local government’s information disclosure in China’s environmental project construction from the dual-pressure perspective

Abstract

Both the bottom-up public protest and the up-down superior intervention are the crucial factors of influencing government’s action in crisis situation, but few researches have provided a synthetic framework to understand local officials’ information openness in China’s environmental project construction. In this article, we develop a dual-pressure model to systematically investigate how local governments response the public’s information disclosure appeals in the progress of environmental project construction. To achieve this goal, a tripartite evolutionary game model among the central government, local authorities and local residents was conducted to explain local authorities’ disclosure action. Particular attention was given to examine how both the bottom-up social protest and the top-down superior intervention, and their relation between them influence local government’s information openness, and also analyze the collective strategies of promoting local governments and their officials to take full disclosure action in the progress of environmental project construction. The findings indicated that local governments and their officials’ disclosure strategies are sensitive to the top-down superior intervention, as well as the bottom-up public protest in the progress of environmental project construction, but both of them have different role in influencing local officials to take full disclosure measures. Of which, the bottom-up public protest, though still with a limited scope, can help focus the central government’s attention on local officials’ limited disclosure, and thus triggering the superior intervention system, and the up-down superior intervention aims to response to local residents’ protest to local officials’ limited disclosure. The benign interaction between the central government and the public can help break the monopolization of risk information from local bureaucracy, and thus improving local government’s disclosure performance.