Association for Public Policy Analysis & Management

As environmental sustainability becomes the biggest challenge for China’s sustainable development, profound institutional changes have taken place in China’s environmental governance practices. Whereas existing literature has widely documented the local implementation gap in China’s environmental policy, scholars also have observed great disparity across jurisdictions in local environmental policy actions. Despite the limitations of the command-and-control system characterizing China’s environmental policy, some cities have taken own initiatives in pursuing environmental policy and management innovations while other cities have lagged behind. Meanwhile, another critical feature of the changing environmental governance regime in China has been the rising environmental awareness and pro-environmental behavior among urban citizens in China. What has not been fully understood, however, is whether pioneering actions in environmental sustainability by local government in China resonates with the rising environmental concern among urban citizens, thereby forging the transition toward a bottom-up model of environmental governance.

In this paper, we present a multi-level analysis to empirically investigate the relationship between city-level environmental governance factors and individual-level environmental concern in urban China. We compile a city-level dataset that captures whether a city was a designated experimentation site by central government ministries for innovative policy measures in various aspects of environmental sustainability, in addition to other indicators that capture a city’s local socio-economic development and local fiscal expenditure on environmental protection.  Combining this city-level dataset with the 2010 China General Social Survey (CGSS) data, we conduct a multi-level statistical model to test the extent to which local government’s sustainability action resonate with the level of environmental concerns among urban citizens. We hypothesize that citizens’ level of environmental concern is higher – i.e. possessing a higher level of awareness to environmental issues, as well as more actively engaging in environment-friendly behavior – in cities that have been more progressive in local sustainability actions – e.g. investing more public finance in environmental protection, and being pioneers as central government designated experimental sites in environmental policy.  Included control variables are individual socio-demographic variables – e.g. age, gender, education, household income, employment, and personal environmental knowledge, as well as city-level variables that capture the level of socio-economic development and citizens’ exposure to environmental degradation.

By bringing city-level governance factors to the understanding of individual citizens’ environmental attitudes and behavior, our empirical findings contribute to the scholarly understanding of the complex interaction between government and citizens in sustainable governance and enlighten China’s policymaking toward better governance for sustainability.