Influence Of Central Government On Local Environmental Policy Implementation

With the rapid economic development,China's environmental problems have become more severe,and gradually become the constraints of China's sustained development.After decades of efforts on environmental protection,some of the policies implemented by Chinese government bring to satisfactory results,and some are not.One of the main problems of China's environmental governance lies in policy implementation.Pollutant discharge permit system is always regarded as the basis policy of point source management policy system,which is so far not well carried out in local level in China.On the other side,the creative target oriented system of Total Emission Reduction(TER)has achieved some success in pollution reduction of point sources.From the perspective of local leaders' motives on the decision-making of policy implementation,this essay regarded local governments as a rational economic men and developed a conceptual model of local government's decision-making.Based on that,we carried out comparative and qualitative analysis on how the central government incentive local leaders to implement environmental policies,with case study of permit versus target system in Tai Lake Basin.The results show that the local government's environmental policy implementation decisions will be affected by incentive and restrains offered by the center,including policy authority,the relevance of policy implementation assessment with the cadres' evaluation standards,rule set of rewards and penalties,supervision regulation,difficulty and ambiguity of central goals,financial support and other factors.The use of the implementation assessment results on cadre's performance evaluation influences local leaders most.Incentive measures and supervision regulations ensure the behavior change of local governments.In addition,the focus and attitude of central government towards various policies revealed from the incentive mechanism are valued by local decision-makers.Based on research,the following policy recommendations are proposed.First,target-oriented policy system compared to other policies are better implemented,and the assessment and monitoring mechanism shall be improved.Second,severe punitive measures such as accountability,"one-vote veto" and regional restrictions with strict regulatory regime ensure that the cost of local government's not implementation is high.Third,increasing the legal status of environmental policy and policies initiated by more authoritative departments will enhance local implementation.Finally,the increase of government environmental information disclosure and public participation will incentive local governments to implement environmental policies under public pressure.