The Impacts Of Public Participation On Local Environmental Governance

While the China' s economy has gained great success,the environment has also shown a deteriorating trend.On the one hand,the environment,as a "public product",has a strong positive externality and is difficult to supply effectively by the free market.On the other hand,environmental governance still needs to rely on local governments.However,because of China's GDP development as a performance evaluation target,local governments tend to chase economic interests and neglect environmentprotection,which makesmarket and government in environmental governance fail at the same time.For the above mentioned problems,we often look forward to public participation,because only can it effectively compensate for market and government's failures.However,even though there are many legal systems in China to protect public participation in environmental governance,whether it can really influence local environmental governance with economic development as the primary goal is worthy of our research.Therefore,based on Shanghai's environmental data from 2001 to 2015,this paper uses the system GMM regression to analyze.The results show that there isthe limited impact of public participation on local environmental governance.Specifically,public participation has a significant impact on local environmental regulation,but impacting on investment of environmental protection is not obvious.Finally,in order to improve the quality of public participation,this paper proposes four suggestions:first,improving the assessment mechanism and the sense of officials' responsibilities;second,strengthening interaction and easing the contradictions between the government and public;third,improving the incentive mechanism and stimulatingenthusiasm of the public participation;fourth,fostering self-awareness and giving the public more social space.