| China's environmental challenges have been well documented. By using the environmental expenditure as the major indicator of prefectural governments' efforts in pollution control, this research finds out a pattern divergent from the predictions of existing literature. The environmental expenditure is clearly leptokurtic, rather than normally or incrementally distributed. In fact, the observed pattern exhibits the characteristic of punctuated equilibrium, involving an excess of stagnation and small change as well as an excess of large-scale changes occasionally. The existing literature fails to account for such divergent pattern. Aiming to fill this gap, this research proposes an analytical framework to explain this observed pattern. The framework mainly comprises two components: institutions and policymakers' attentions. First, institutions play multiple roles in imposing transaction cost in the process of decision-making, rendering the stability and stagnation of environmental budget outcome. Also, the scope and aspects of policymakers' attention are constrained by current institutions, making it difficult to direct their attention to environmental aspects of decision-making context. Second, an excess of large-scale changes is triggered by attention-shift of policymakers. The attention-shift to environmental issues could pave way for environmental topics to get into the policy agenda, the large-scale change of expenditure and proactive initiative by prefectural governments. Therefore, the factors that propel attention shifting of policymakers are incessantly counteracting the effect of negative feedback imposed by current institutions. Based on regression analysis and case study, this research finds out the logic of pollution control that explains the environmental governance at prefectural levels. First, the changes of pollutants are not statistically correlated with the change of environmental budgetary outcome; environmental governance at prefectural levels is not determined by the changes of pollution levels, but led both by institutions and the attention shifting of policy makers. Second, changes of status-quo of policy outputs rarely emerge due to the high transaction cost and limited scopes of policymakers' attentions, making prefectural governments lack of initiative on environmental governance. Third, attention-shift of policymakers plays a paramount role in triggering a sudden excess of large-scale changes. Fourth, the regression result indicates that the bottom-up pressure in the society, the supervision of local peoples' congress, the environmental pressure from superior governments and the capabilities of local EPBs are statistically correlated with attention shifting. Evidences provided by case study also unveil the mechanisms of attention-shift. In order to maximize their influences, all the participants act strategically and endeavor to influence the attention allocation of policymakers by episodically inserting conflicting dimensions. of decision-making contexts that policymakers has not attended to or ignored. The case indicates that the concurrence of these four factors can effectively overcome the resisting forces imposed by institutions, and attract the policymakers' attentions. Once policymakers attend to environmental issues, the environmental agenda could be easily built as one of the policy agendas, then environmental expenditure is more likely to increase significantly and prefectural governments' behaviors of environmental governance tend to be more responsive and proactive. |
