Evaluation And Improvement Path Of Regional Ecological Compensation Policy

The rapid development of human society has led to increasingly serious environmental pollution and ecological destruction.Environmental problems such as global warming,air pollution and water pollution have hindered China’s high-quality social and economic development.This is mainly reflected in the imbalance and inadequacy of regional development.As an important means of environmental governance,ecological compensation policy(ECP)is helpful to balance the interests of related subjects and maximize regional interests.The ECP is highly valued by the theoretical circle and the decision-making level in China.At present,the evaluation of ECP,especially the theoretical and empirical cases of major strategic regions of the country,is lacking and need to be further enriched.The Yangtze River Economic Belt(YREB)is not only a major national strategic development area,but also the main battlefield of ecological priority and green development,and the main force leading high-quality economic development.The multi-angle comprehensive assessment of ECP in the YREB will not only enrich the theory and method system of regional ecological compensation,but also improve the level and implementation effect of ECP.It also helps to clarify the key direction of regional ecological compensation policy formulation and implementation,and provides cases and reference basis for regional ecological compensation.This paper follows the logical framework of ecological compensation "policy program evaluation → policy implementation evaluation → policy performance evaluation →design of policy performance improvement path → suggestions for policy optimization",and comprehensively uses multiple disciplines’ theories and methods to construct a comprehensive theoretical framework for regional ECP evaluation.Then,the whole process of ECP in the YREB is systematically evaluated to explore the improvement path of policy performance.Finally,the paper puts forward some suggestions on the optimization of ECP.The main research contents and conclusions of this paper are as follows:(1)Text analysis and social network analysis are used to study the background and characteristics of China’s ECP.The results show that China’s ECP has gone through the initial stage,formation stage and perfection stage,and has been applied to forests,river basins,oceans,wetlands,grasslands,national key ecological functional areas and other fields.The policies focus on the performance assessment after the implementation of ecological compensation,vertical and horizontal compensation methods,market compensation,multiple stakeholders,etc.The main cooperation of ECP is mainly between the government and the government,and the cooperation between the government and enterprises,social organizations and people is less.The use of policy tools is dominated by command and capacity building,while the use of incentive and exhortation tools is obviously less.(2)Based on the evolutionary game model,this paper analyzes the strategic evolution and influencing factors of implementation subjects of ECP in the YREB.The results show that the main factors affecting the strategies of A and B are short-term economic benefits,vertical and horizontal ecological compensation,input cost of participating in protection and governance cost of not participating in protection.The main factors affecting the central government’s strategy are the cost of implementing the regulation strategy,the amount of ecological compensation and the amount of incentives.Reward distribution coefficient,short-term economic income,long-term economic income,vertical and horizontal ecological compensation amount are the key variables affecting the evolution of the system,so special attention should be paid to the distribution of compensation amount and the participation of various stakeholders in the implementation of policies.(3)Propensity score matching and differences-in-differences method were used to evaluate the environmental effects of ECP of cities in the YREB.The results show that ECP improve the overall environmental quality of all cities in the YREB,and the impact on water environmental quality is significantly greater than that on air environmental quality.ECP’s environmental effects vary according to the sizes of the cities.The impact of small cities is the strongest,followed by big cities,and the impact of mega-cities is the weakest.ECP’s environmental effects in the YREB also varies according to the locations of the cities.The impact on atmospheric environment and water environment quality of the eastern cities is significant,the impact on water environment quality of the central cities is significant,but not significant in the western region.(4)The project pursuit model,data envelopment analysis method and coupling coordination model were used to evaluate the compensation benefits,efficiency and comprehensive performance of ECP of cities in the YREB from 2010 to 2021.The results show that the overall level of ecological compensation benefits in the YREB presents an irregular W-shaped fluctuation trend,with regional and city size heterogeneity.The overall efficiency of ecological compensation is at a medium level and shows a U-shaped fluctuation trend.The spatial differentiation of ecological compensation efficiency is similar in different regions and cities.The overall performance of ecological compensation is in the middle and lower level,and the trend of change in time series is not significant.The difference of compensation performance in cities of different sizes is not obvious.The compensation performance was the highest in eastern region and the lowest in central region.(5)Based on the combination of necessary condition analysis and fuzzy set qualitative comparative analysis,this paper discusses the configuration and improvement path of high/non-high ECP performance in the YREB.The results show that there are 4 and 5 effective configurations of high/non-high ECP performance in cities of the YREB,respectively.There are three ways to improve the ecological compensation performance of the YREB: The technology-organization oriented path,with industrial structure upgrading and green technology innovation as the core conditions,which is applicable to all types of cities.The organizationenvironment oriented path,with industrial structure upgrading,public participation and urbanization rate as the core conditions,is suitable for large cities and smaller cities.The multi-element jointly driven path is suitable for large cities and mega-cities.In short,the formulation and implementation of regional ECP should pay attention to the participation of multiple subjects,pay attention to reasonable distribution of vertical and horizontal ecological compensation methods and compensation amounts.The environmental effects and comprehensive performance after the implementation of ECP have regional and city size heterogeneity.And industrial structure upgrading,green technology innovation and urbanization rate are the key influencing factors.Finally,this paper puts forward optimization suggestions on regional ecological compensation policy plan,implementation and performance evaluation from many aspects,such as promoting the balance of policy tools and coordination of policy subjects,improving the supervision and incentive mechanism of policy implementation,increasing the sources of compensation funds and compensation methods,and improving the evaluation criteria and promotion paths of policy performance.