Research On The Impact Of Institution Intervention On Villagers' Willingness To Pay For Environment Governance

Since the reform and opening, along with the rapid development of economy and society, serious environmental pollution exists in our country. The deterioration of environment leads to the awareness of the importance of protecting the environment on the state, society and individual level. However, most funds have been used in the control of environmental pollution in cities and the urban environment is improving, while what worries many is that environmental problems in rural areas have always been neglected. At present, that the situation of rural environment in China is at stake has become an indisputable fact. It breaks up the basic conditions of agriculture in concealed or public ways and disorganizes the system of rural areas. The government has attached great importance and spared no effort to the protection of rural environment. However, the government fails sometime when facing a task complicated and widely-covered as such. Therefore, traditional environment governance pattern is hard to adapt to the current complicated pollution situation. Rural environment governance also needs the participation of the public, groups, and informal organization, thus forming a multi-dimensional management mode with multi-subjects involved. In the countryside, every villager is not only the pollution maker, but also the ultimate beneficiary of environment improvement. Therefore, the management of the rural environment is closely related to every villager and inseparable from their cooperation and participation. In order to make the villagers become an important power in environmental governance, it requires the involvement of formal and informal institutions including trust, prestige of the elites and punishment mechanism besides government and market.Based on this, taking a case study of rural domestic pollution, the paper is divided into five parts. The first part is introduction, mainly includes the background and research significance. The second part is literature review and theoretical framework. The third part introduces the study area background and data sources, and empirically analyzes the impact of trust, the prestige of the elites and punishment mechanism on villagers' willingness to pay for environment governance. The fourth part is the empirical result analysis and robustness testing. The fifth part is the research conclusion and related policy suggestions.The paper ends with the following conclusions: personal income and politics status exert great influence on the villagers willingness to pay for environmental governance and their level of payment; Intervention of individual trust can effectively encourage resonance in people when facing decisions of payment for environmental governance, thus leading to collective cooperation and the rational judgment and choice to be willing to pay; Villagers' trust on local government or village committee can promote the cooperation or obedience to the payment of a certain cost of environment governance, so as to improve their willingness to pay for environment governance, but it exerts no obvious effects on their level of payment; Prestige of the elites on village level have great influence on villagers' level of payment and willingness to pay for environment governance, due to the fact that rural elites have certain social status and prestige, people are often influenced by rural elites' payment for environment governance and make the same choice; Punishment mechanism as the only institutional variable in this paper also has significant influence on villagers' willingness to pay for environment governance and their level of payment. Under the constraint of the punishment, villagers would consider that the punishment cost of their bad behavior and habits such as "littering" is greater than the cost of their cooperation on environment governance and gradually change their bad habits; Comparing formal institution with informal institution in their influence on the dependent variable, this paper finds that formal institution's influence on villagers' willingness to pay for environment governance is more strong, while the intervention of informal institutions such as trust and the authority of the elites is also essential; On the two levels of individual and village, institutional variables' impact on villagers' willingness to pay for environment governance has no big difference. In the end, some policy suggestions according to the research conclusion have been put forward.