Study On The Impact Of Central Environmental Protection Inspection On Chinese Local Governments’ Performance Of Air Pollution

Greatly though China’s economy has achieved,the severe circumstances of environmental pollution and ecological deterioration have constantly emerged in company with the economic development.Not only has the environmental problem become a bottleneck restricting economic development,but it will also impede the process of satisfying people’s growing needs for a better life,and even pose a challenge to the public’s trust in government and social order.The government has attached great importance to environmental protection as the environmental costs keep spiraling.Since the 18th CPC National Congress,the concept of ecological civilization construction and environmental protection has received unprecedented attention at the national level,but the enforcement of relevant environmental policies has been far less than expectation.Against the background,the central government initiated environmental protection inspection,trying to use the central authority to break the local governments’conventional environmental governance mechanism,transmitting environmental pressure from top to bottom to form potential energy,enhancing the implementation of environmental policies at the grassroots,and improving the limited validity of environmental enforcement and supervision within the local governments’bureaucratic system.In this paper,I first examine the question of whether central environmental protection inspection has a significant impact on Chinese local governments’performance of air pollution from a macro perspective by applying a difference-in-differences analysis based on the daily air quality panel data of 288 prefecture-level cities in China from September 2015 to May 2018.Then a detailed description of how the central environmental protection inspection works at the grassroots is provided from a micro perspective under the theoretical framework of principal-agent and campaign-style governance theory.The empirical evidence is based on a field interview of Q town in F district of Shanghai and the official news archives issued by the Ministry of Ecology and Environment.The main research findings are as below:First,the central environmental protection inspection significantly improves the local governments’performance of air pollution.Specifically,compared with non-supervised cities,after controlling prefecture fixed effects,period fixed effects,climatic control variables and seasonal vacation control variables,the central environmental protection inspection significantly reduces the AQI（Air Quality Index）by 3.85 and the concentration of PM_2.5（fine particles with a diameter of 2.5 micrometers or less）and PM₁₀（coarse particles with a diameter between 2.5 and 10 micrometers）of the supervised cities by 3.52 and 5.84 respectively.Besides,after the placebo test and other robustness tests,the impact of the central environmental protection inspection on the local governments’performance of air pollution is still significant.Second,the central environmental protection inspection,a high-hierarchy,high-standard and high-authority inspection initiated by the central government,embodies many characteristics of campaign-style governance in the process of implementation.It roots in the remedy of conventional environmental governance.Through pan-politicization of administrative tasks,environmental protection has become the central work of grass-roots governments.Combined with extensive political and social mobilization,the central government is able to ensure the effectiveness of central environmental protection inspection.In addition,the response mechanism of Q town,located in F district of Shanghai,to the central environmental protection inspection concluded from the field interview is as follows:conversion from passive response to active adaptation,task-driven special action mode and rectification.Although from the perspective of the response mechanism,the local government’s environmental governance and rectification may be only effective in a short term,its organizational adjustments reflect the tendency of routinization and institutionalization.At the end,three policy recommendations based on research findings are put forward in this paper.Firstly,it is essential to reinforce the legal foundation of the central environmental protection inspection and accelerate the legalization process of the central environmental protection inspection;secondly,it is necessary to eliminate the one-size-fits-all behavior in the local governments’rectification process and achieve the long-term effectiveness of environmental governance with a fault-tolerant mechanism;last but not least,it is of far-reaching significance to establish an environmental governance mechanism with comprehensive public participation to help the public engage in orderly and institutionalized environmental governance.