Association for Public Policy Analysis & Management

Recently, sustainable development became a key goal of environment policy around the world. However, the sustainable goal of policy is usually suffered by implementation failures, especially at the sub-national level. Therefore, this paper reviews the political implementation in China, which is conducted under the condition of low policy ambiguity and high policy conflict to achieve effectiveness according to the theory. We argue that the political implementation may simultaneously lead to an unsustainable result except the expectation of policy-makers, due to the ambiguous implementation process in authoritarian states. This paper examines the central environmental inspection (CEI) during 2016 to 2017, a political implementation instrument used by Chinese central government for recoupling local resources and power to reach effective environmental governance, as an empirical case. Based on the difference-in-difference approach, I find a novel fact that the total industrial pollution decreased under CEI while the illegal pollution information disclosure of the industrial enterprises increased. The in-depth interviews from field survey complement the mechanism of the causality that the ambiguity within the implementation process of CEI triggered the local executors chasing their interests rather than corresponding with the willing of the central government. The findings implicate the importance of central government’s policy launching with not only the low ambiguity of goal but also the low ambiguity of implementation. This paper contributes to both the theory of policy implementation and the practice of sustainable environmental governance.