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Evaluating the effects of campaign-style environmental governance: evidence from Environmental Protection Interview in China

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Abstract

Campaign-style governance is one of the political methods adopted by the Communist Party of China and the Chinese government, which is usually used to make up for shortcomings when regular governance policies fail because the defined tasks are incompatible with other policy goals, especially in the field of environmental governance. An “Environmental Protection Interview (EPI)” is one of the campaign-style environmental governance methods that target local officials. In this paper, the causal relationship between the implementation of EPI and pollutant emission reduction was confirmed using the method of Time-Varying Difference-in-difference (Time-Varying DID) to compensate for endogeneity problem and ensure that the results are still valid after several robustness checks. Our regional heterogeneous analysis shows that the policy effects of EPI decrease from east to west in China and that they have different emission reduction effects on various types of pollutants. Unfortunately, the results also suggest that policy implementation only temporarily affects pollutant emission reduction, which could be attributed to the governance approaches of campaign-style enforcement according to the impact mechanism analysis. This paper implies that the EPI should be continued to be implemented in the future with some improvements on pollutant reduction mechanisms to ensure effective adoption.

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Notes

  1. The 2016 China Water Resources Bullet is available at: http://www.mwr.gov.cn/sj/tjgb/szygb/201707/t20170711955305.html

  2. The 2016 China Land Resources Bullet is available at: http://www.mnr.gov.cn/sj/tjgb/201807/P020180704391918680508.pdf

  3. This news report is available in: https://baijiahao.baidu.com/s?id=1636204082501808209&wfr=spider&for=pc.

  4. Luna Lin, “Will China’s new premier Li Keqiang improve the environment?”, China Dialogue, February 4, 2013, https://www.chinadialogue.net/article/show/single/en/5847-Will-China-s-new-premier-Li-Keqiang-improve-the-environment-.

  5. The homepage of SEDAC is: https://sedac.ciesin.columbia.edu/data/set/sdei-global-annual-gwr-pm2-5-modis-misr-seawifs-aod/data-download.

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Acknowledgments

We want to thank Prof. Ying Fang for his comments and suggestions on this paper. We also want to thank the anonymous referees for their constructive suggestions on the earlier draft of our paper, upon which we have improved the content.

Funding

This paper was funded by the National Social Science Foundation of China (14BGL161).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of International and Public Affairs, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Shanghai, 200030, China

    Yihang Zhao & Yu Wang

  2. Technische Universität Dresden, Institute of Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing, Dresden, Germany

    Xinlong Zhang

  3. China Institute for Urban Governance, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Shanghai, 200030, China

    Yu Wang

Authors
  1. Yihang Zhao
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  2. Xinlong Zhang
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  3. Yu Wang
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Correspondence to Yu Wang.

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Responsible editor: Eyup Dogan

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Zhao, Y., Zhang, X. & Wang, Y. Evaluating the effects of campaign-style environmental governance: evidence from Environmental Protection Interview in China. Environ Sci Pollut Res 27, 28333–28347 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11356-020-09243-9

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