Research On Environmental Policy Implementation Model

In recent years, an increasingly number of serious environment problems of China, which affected people physically and psychologically, has attracted extensive concern in the world. It is well known that Chinese government has worked out a series of policies for the environment problems. However, unfortunately few of them worked well. This is not mainly due to the so-called imperfect policies but, in fact, the lack of policy implementation. Even though thousands of researches have concentrated on this issue and enriched the understanding of the environment policy implementation through different perspectives, few of them brought up effective solutions. Two main reasons could be summarized as follows. One is that previous researches didn’t account for a theoretical framework for comprehensively understanding of the policy implementation, which usually causes misunderstanding of the environment policies when incidents happened. The other reason is that most of them neglected the complexity and variability of implementation processes. In other words,the policy implementation should not be a "cure-all prescription", but a concrete pack for each case. Considering these two challenges, this paper is trying to find out an interpretative analysis framework for comprehensively understanding the policy implementation, which then will focus on following questions:1) Which elements affect the implementation of the policy and how do they work?2) Any relationship between these elements?3) Will the relationship among the elements lead to different styles of implementation modes?4) From the policy-making point, any suggestion for reducing the "implementation gap" among different implementation modes?Based on Ambiguity-conflict model and key variables introduced in previous study, this paper investigated the following issue:the nature of policy (independent variables), policy context/environment and the implementers (intermediate variables) to the policy implementation (dependent variable). As the main foundation of this paper, the key variables, affecting the political implementation, are assumed to depend on the nature of the policy and policy implementation processes. Starting from differentiating the level of ambiguity and conflict, the policy will be divided into four types:1) The political implementation of low ambiguity and high conflict;2) The experimental implementation of high ambiguity and low conflict;3) The symbolic implementation of high ambiguity and high conflict;4)The administrative implementation of low ambiguity and low conflict. After that, four policy cases will be analyzed to investigate the key variables affecting the implementation, whose results will be used to validate this paper’s theoretical proposition. These four cases are:1) the energy conservation policy,2)the environmental policy in rural areas,3) the Huai River clear policy and4) the environmental supervision standardization policy.There are four main conclusions of this paper:1) in administrative implementation mode, the key variables affecting the policy implementation are the sufficiency of resources and bureaucratic level of an organization. For example, if the completion of a policy requires the joint operation of several departments, the complexity of the joint action will affect the results of the policy implementation;2) in symbolic implementation mode, the power of the local union will eventually determine the effect of policy implementation. That is to say, if the decision-makers occupy the high ground in morality or legitimacy, they will win the game with the local union in short run;3) in experimental implementation mode, the local participants who are in dominant position and its resources determine the results of the policy implementation. However, if the local government deviates too far away from the policy intentions, the central government could terminate local implementation;4) in political implementation mode, without the compensation of the implementers’damaged interests, even though the decision-makers could impose to produce some measurable policy outcomes, the effects of these outcomes would be much far away from expectation. Moreover, if the decision-makers and implementers have a multiple relationship rather than the relationship between policy formulator and implementer, the implementers will obtain a bargaining power in that specific time and then may give up the implementation of the immediate policy. This multiple relationship could be caused by the mutual dependence relationship.The paper will contribute to both theoretical system and the practical implementation. Based on empirical studies of China’s environment policy, this paper develops four policy implementation modes, which provides an interpretive framework for the implementation of the transition policies. Furthermore, through expanding and amending the Ambiguity-conflict model, the paper demonstrates the common significance of this theoretical proposition. From practical aspects, in order to reduce the "implementation gap", four policy modes should be implemented differently:1) for the political implementation, the "problem solving" should be oriented, rather than the completion of specific indicators;2) for the administrative implementation, it is essential to get rid of "political state" status and build a modern bureaucratic organization;3) for the symbolic implementation, it should be regarded as the process of communication between different opinions and the process of learning methods and techniques for particular environment;4) for experimental implementation, it will be useful to optimize the local implementation structure and promote the suitability between policies and specific environment. Moreover, an alternative is probably supposed to form small government, which could simplify the implementation processes and then get benefits from terminal management.