The Effects Of Government Environmental Information Disclosure And Media Attention On The Environmental Governance

After the reform and opening up,China’s economy has developed rapidly and successfully helped China become the second largest economy in the world,while significantly improving people’s living standards and quality of life.However,under the development model of "high capital investment,high resource consumption and high pollution emission",China’s ecological environment has been severely damaged,and the development model of the society with only economic goals has brought a serious crisis to the ecological environment.In the midst of the unprecedented changes of the century,the dual pressure of economic growth and environmental protection,how to achieve high-quality economic and social development and high level of ecological environment protection,is a new problem and challenge for our government.The ecological environment is becoming increasingly fragile,and frequent environmental accidents and serious environmental pollution damage people’s interests and health,causing serious social panic and anxiety.Environmental governance and environmental restoration have become the focus of the government’s attention,and managing environmental pollution and restoring the ecological environment are on the government’s agenda.The Party Central Committee,with Comrade Xi Jinping as the core,attaches great importance to the construction of ecological civilization,systematically builds top-level design in the field of ecology and environment,introduces relevant laws and regulations on environmental pollution prevention and control,and guarantees the important status of environmental governance at the institutional level.Improving the government’s environmental governance capacity is one of the components of modernizing the national governance system and capacity.Efficient government environmental management requires credible,comprehensive,transparent and high-quality environmental information,which not only requires enterprises to disclose relevant environmental information during their development operations,but also requires the government to disclose environment-related information in order to better fulfill its responsibility of protecting the environment.The media,as an information dissemination tool,is sensitive to environmental information and has a wide range of information sources,so it can accurately grasp the key issues in the process of environmental governance and disseminate environment-related information in a timely manner.The media’s exposure of environmental information and exposure of environmental pollution incidents can help environmental protection and improve the effectiveness of governance to a certain extent.Based on this,this paper empirically analyzes the effect of government environmental information disclosure and media attention on the effect of environmental governance using inter-provincial panel data from 2008-2018,using Chinese inter-provincial units as the research object.This paper will explore: is the effect of government environmental information disclosure on the effect of environmental governance significant? Is the effect of media attention on the effect of environmental governance significant? Is there an interaction effect between government environmental information disclosure and media attention,and is the interaction effect between the two significant on the effect of environmental governance?This study found that: in terms of government environmental information disclosure,government environmental information disclosure positively affects environmental governance effects,and provincial governments follow environmental policies for environmental information disclosure.The higher the environmental information disclosure score,the better the environmental governance effect tends to be.In terms of media attention,media attention positively affects the effect of environmental governance.The more media reports related to the environment in each province indicate that the media pay more attention to environmental pollution and environmental governance,which to a certain extent will promote the improvement of environmental governance effect.Based on the previous benchmark regression,the impact of the interaction effect between government environmental information disclosure and media attention on environmental governance effect is further explored.There is an interaction effect between government environmental information disclosure and media attention,and the interaction effect of government environmental information disclosure and media attention positively affects the environmental governance effect.The government uses the media as a platform to disclose its own environmental information,and the media plays its monitoring role to supervise the work of environmental information disclosure subjects,which in turn has a positive effect on the improvement of environmental governance effectiveness.Based on the findings of this paper,policy recommendations are proposed to enhance the effectiveness of environmental governance: first,improve relevant government regulations and systems to promote comprehensive and systematic disclosure of environmental information.These mainly include: improving the legislation and system construction of government environmental information disclosure,and expanding the content and scope of government disclosure of environmental pollutants.Second,strengthen the construction of media professional ethics and norms,and give full play to the role of media supervision.Mainly including:strengthen the construction of professional ethics and norms of media workers,and promote the complementarity and integration of traditional media and emerging media.Finally,establish a linkage mechanism between the government and the media to accelerate the formation of environmental governance synergy.Mainly including: play the media’s role in disseminating environmental information to the government,and form a model of coordinated disclosure of environmental information between the government and the media.