Abstract
Ecological compensation policies for the watershed (ECPW) have played a guiding role in establishing a sound watershed ecological compensation system with Chinese characteristics, and the quantitative evaluation of current policies can provide a reference for policy optimization. Firstly, taking 77 ECPW promulgated in China from 2006 to 2020 as the research objects, this paper extracted keyword frequencies using a text mining method, and then selected the policy indicators by combining the policy characteristics and existing results of watershed ecological compensation. Secondly, the Fuzzy analytic hierarchy process was used to determine the weights of the variables and improve the Policy Modeling Consistency Index (PMC-Index). Finally, the empirical analysis was conducted on six typical policies and the differences among P1, P3, and P5 at the three levels of the national, provincial, and municipal levels were further explored and compared. It was found that (1) the consistency evaluation of P1, P2, P3, and P4 were excellent levels, and that of P5 and P6 were acceptable levels. (2) The mean value of an improved PMC-Index of the six strategies was 0.6287, which indicated that the overall performance of the quality of ECPW was good, but still room for improvement. (3) The quality of China’s ECPW showed a trend that the higher the level of government, the better the overall performance of the policy. The more targeted the ECPW, the lower the PMC index score, which is manifested in indicators such as incentive measures, policy mechanisms, policy areas, and policy functions. This study helps to fully understand the strengths and weaknesses of China’s single ECPW.
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The data involved in the study can be obtained from the corresponding author at reasonable request.
Notes
ROSTCM6 is a large-scale, free social computing platform developed by Professor Shen Yang of Wuhan University to aid research in the humanities and social sciences. The software enables policy analysis, sentiment analysis, website analysis, browsing analysis, word frequency statistics, traffic analysis, clustering analysis, and a range of other text analyses.
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Acknowledgements
Thanks to Thomas Stephen Ramsey who is working at China Three Gorges University for repeatedly revising the language expression of this article, which made it more suitable for international readers.
Funding
This study is supported by the Social Science Fund of Jiangsu in China (No. 20GLD003), the Water Conservancy Science and Technology Projects in Jiangsu Province of China (No. 2020069), the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities (B220202032), and the Philosophy and Social Science Project in Universities of Jiangsu (No. 2020SJA0863).
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Conceptualization, writing—original draft, formal analysis, Shuqin Li; supervision, writing—review and editing, Juqin Shen; diagrams, data preprocessing, Fuhua Sun; writing—original draft, writing—review and editing, Yizhen Jia; software, methodology, writing—review and editing, Haikun Han.
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Li, S., Shen, J., Sun, F. et al. Quantitative evaluation of ecological compensation policies for the watershed in China: based on the improved Policy Modeling Consistency Index. Environ Sci Pollut Res 29, 66659–66674 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11356-022-20503-8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11356-022-20503-8