The Intrinsic Mechanism And Effect Of Environmental Governance Division Between Central And Local Government

This paper discusses the mechanism of environmental governance division between local and central government,and investigates the influence to environmental governance.The existing literatures mainly focused on the impact of fiscal decentralization, and use fiscal decentralization instead of environmental governance decentralization.Based on the particularity and complexity of environmental governance,Study on the division of environmental governance powers should be refined.In this paper, environmental governance is subdivided into environmental regulation standard setting, EIA approval, pollution prevention, environmental regulation; the effects of environmental governance is subdivided into investment in environmental management and pollution emissions. On the above basis, we studied the mechanism and evolution process of environmental governance division and the influence on environmental governance effect.The governance division of public affairs in China not only follow the principle of efficiency, but also affected by the political risk factors.The relationship between central government, local government, residents in environmental governance is as follows:the central government takes ruling stability as the basic goal and masters the initiative of power division, system design, incentive assessment. In order to achieve the goal, the central government formulates the ruling task and delegate to local government.In the budget constraint and incentive mechanism of punishment, the local government choose public affairs governance strategy to maximize their own interests.Governance of central and local government directly decides the effect of public affairs governance and affect people’s satisfaction,that influences political risk and transfer to the central government, and affect ruling stability.This is the basic logic of the governance division in China from the perspective of political risk: when political risk is large, the division of powers has centralized trend, when political risk is small, it is divided according to the principle of efficiency.This logic runs through the reform of public affairs governance system such as financial system, production safety, land management and environmental governance,especially since the mid-90 s of the 20 th century.According to the analysis framework, this paper focuses on environmental system evolution, and build a model to analyze how central government adjust the environmental governance system to satisfy the residential environmental preferences.Specifically, central government should decentralization of approval authority to promote local economic development when technological advances have reduced political risk by the EIA approval, the central environmental regulatory powers should be tightened when political risk increased by environmental pollution.This paper constructs the EIA approval decentralization index and environmental regulatory decentralization index and use the fixed effects model and dynamic panel model for empirical test with provincial panel data during 1997-2013.This paper presents a possible way to improve environmental governance effect, it can also improve the environmental governance effect by affecting the environmental preference transmission mechanism between the central and local govermengt and resident. Based on this idea,to adopt a multi center environmental governance model,Strengthen the participation of residents in environmental governance,increase the degree of democracy and so on,that can make the residential environmental preferences transfer to local government more directly and break the limitations of the environment in the system of centralization and decentralization.Besides, for futher evidence of China’s environmental governance system transition, this paper examines the impact on environmental governance effect by fiscal decentralization, the EIA approval decentralization, the regulation decentralization. We find that the relationship between fiscal decentralization and environmental investment is U,fiscal decentralization has "substitution effect" and "income effect" on environmental governance.The EIA approval decentralization will increase the investment of local government, but this effect is mainly due to local government take more affairs.The environmental supervision decentralization reduces the intensity of environmental regulation of local government and makes the pollution more serious.Therefore, in the premise of political risk under control,the direction of the reform of the EIA approval system should be based on decentralization, reform of environmental supervision system should be mainly centralization.Besides,the central government should reform the financial system and performance evaluation system,encourage local governments to protect the environment through economic incentives and political incentives.