Association for Public Policy Analysis & Management

Whether political incentive used by authoritarian states can promote environment governance performance is hotly debated in academic community. There are two major theoretical frameworks for China’s improving environment governance since 2006. One relates such progress to mandatory indexes, which poses a pressure in officials’ performance evaluations, in 11th and 12th Five-Year-Programs. Such pressure would stimulate officials’ interests to protect environment. The other theory gives credits to the informal institution in China’s officials’ promotion, which emphasizes on the impact of personal connect rather than formal regulations. This theory tends to believe that mandatory indexes have very limited effects on local official’s behavior.

And what are the real factors lead to China’s improvement? We conduct a survey of 1019 officials and receive 717 valid answers. Based on principal-agent, altruism and stewardship theories, this paper builds a new theoretical model, which distinguishes incentives under formal and informal institution, and tests the hypotheses by using structural equation model (SEM).

Test results and analysis in this paper show three major findings:

First, China’s mandatory indexes have significant impacts on the improved environment governance of local officials. This research supports the current literature relating to the impacts of mandatory indexes.

Secondly, this paper finds out that although mandatory indexes create significant impacts on officials’ behaviors, those impacts, however, are not the result of political reward in formal institutions. The limited influences of formal incentives are due to two main aspects: the deviation of some effective measures of reward & punishment and insufficient pressure on officials’ core interests (promotion).

Furthermore, this paper finds that local officials’ behaviors are mostly determined by the transition of focus of central government and higher authorities in informal institutions. Central government releases its policy preferences through major policy decisions like mandatory indexes. Such preference is the key factor in reshaping local officials’ decisions. And local officials would adjust environment governance based on the determination as well as the demand to maintain effective networking to the superior core authorities. And most importantly, such process was conducted in the informal institutions.

This paper also makes two main contributions:

Firstly it extends width of current studies on environment governance in authoritarian states. Promotion preference is key source of pressure on officials. Therefore political promotion is still the determinate factor in environment governance. And within the promotion system, especially comparing to formal institution, informal institution still has dominant influences.

Nonetheless the conclusion of this paper solves one of the theoretical controversies in policy implementation under authoritarian atmosphere. With a stronger explanatory model, interactive mechanism between policy implementation and incentives extends the understanding the impacts of formal and informal institution. Positive influence of informal institution is for the first time taken into consideration. And such methodology can be applied to other areas thus offers new perspectives in policy analysis in authoritarian regimes.