Association for Public Policy Analysis & Management

Recent air pollution crisis in China raises an alarm on the adequacy of China’s environmental policy and its enforcement. As a country with distributed authoritarian government structure, China experiences difficulties in coordinating environmental governance at different levels. While the central government is responsible for developing policy goals, it is the local governments who implement the policy. The difficulty arises from the fact that local governments’ policy priority does not always match the policy goals delivered from the central government. The multilevel structure of environmental governance makes local governments deal with multiple policy goals that sometimes conflict each other, i.e. industrial support and reducing pollution, deviating from environmental policy goals from the central government. In this paper, we pay attention to environmental information disclosure measuring the deviation of local government from the central government. Revealing information on local environmental quality indicates the extent that local governments support the policy goal from the central government.

Past studies have looked into how environmental information disclosure influences environmental performance of the polluters and the public perception on government accountability. On the latter topic, studies have paid much attention to the mechanism of how such policy empowers the citizens' group. However, the functions of citizens group are weaker in the authoritarian society. In China, the top officials of local governments are not elected but appointed by the central government, leading the role of civil society not as significant as the ones in the constituent-incentive system. The level of transparency in environmental information might not influence the policy making process. On the other hand, the centralized promotional incentive system may motivate local governments to enforce regulations on polluters to prevent any disadvantage from the central government who recently added environmental protection to the promotional evaluation system. Given the context, we investigate whether information disclosure under central incentive system influence local governments work on environmental quality in China. We constructed data on air pollution control and environmental budget of over 280 Chinese local governments from 2006 and 2013. Using econometric models, we empirically examine how the extent of air quality information disclosure influences local government’s policy change and enforcement of air pollution control. We also try examining any spillover effect of environmental information disclosure policy in neighboring local governments through competition or coordination. We expect the findings contribute to enhancing the knowledge of multilevel governance and of policy-to-policy spillover effects. Also, we expect to introduce a new use of environmental quality information that is measuring the functioning of multilevel governance.