Officials' Personal Characteristics And Regional Environmental Governance

The difficulty of great power's governance lies in the vast territory,and the central has to entrust the local to complete all the assigned tasks.Consequently,selecting appropriate personnel to be local leaders is an essential problem of human resource management.The previous researches have discussed national governance mainly from the aspects of the central-local relationship and regional competition.However,they ignore the role of individual officials.Obviously,under certain circumstances that management systems are similar and local governments all compete,local officials with different characteristics are supposed to behave differently when completing upper tasks as well as good governance.Thus,the paper attempts to use municipal-level evidence,exploring the influence that individual characteristics of secretary of municipal Party Committee have on regional environmental governance.Based on available datas range from 2003 to 2013,including 25 provinces and 102 prefecture-level cities,the paper has established three prefecture-level databases about officials,envirornment and cities.Finally,the paper adopts the city fixed effects model,successfully figuring out the relevance between individual characteristics of secretary of municipal Party Committee and regional environmental governance,as well as the corresponding mechanism.The rusults found that environmental protection abilities,promotion incentives and some other characteristics significantly affect regional environmental levels,and this effect varies by region.Higher environmental protection abilities help secretaries deal with those assessed environmental indicators better,while non-assessed and investment indicators show irrelevance.This effect is more obvious in the eastern region.Stronger political networks significantly boost the regional environmental governance,but this positive effect appears in the central region.As for other characteristics,areas governed by certain secretaries,whose level is higher and final education is from the Party school or correspondence,performes better in environmental governance.In addition,implementation of the environmental assessment which began in 2006 plays a positive role in the long term.However,the assessment has no moderating effect on the relationship between individual characteristics of secretaries and environmental governance.In summary,the paper fully demonstrates the impact that officials'individual characteristics have on the regional environmental governance.And the paper puts forward a logic that officials'environmental protection abilities,promotion incentives and other characteristics will lead to differences between regional environmental input and output,which provides a broader perspective to explain uneven local environmental levels and widen the connotation of national governance theory.Besides,the paper provides a reference to develop reasonable and effective personnel system and incentive mechanism,and ultimately promote the regional environmental governance.