River Environmental Policy Evaluation Based On River Health And Ecosystem Services

The evaluation of public policy implementation is an essential step in evaluating its effect,discovering the issues and further improving the situation.A series of water environmental policies have been put into implementation in China in recent years.However,a prevailing trend of 'practice over evaluation' has resulted in little evaluation activity,hence hampered the methodologies development.Currently,most educations are focused on water quality assessment and river management performance.The lack of environmental policy evaluation is one of the factors which make many environmental policies performance unsatisfactory.Therefore,it is necessary to carry out the research on the evaluation system of river environmental policy.The main problems in the current environmental policy evaluation are identified:Firstly,most of the current evaluation are based on general public policy evaluation,which can not reflect the complexity of environmental issues.Secondly,evaluation content is focus on policy implementation results,rather than the whole process of policy.Thirdly,the evaluation system is more qualitative than quantitative.Last but not least.the evaluation index system is not comprehensive enough to reflect the coordination and development of environment,social and economic.This study divides the policy process into policy objectives,policy implementation,policy results(including policy effectiveness and policy efficiency).Through the analysis of policy analysis and policy criterions,the relationship between the whole process of policy and the evaluation criterion is identified.At the same time.the concept of river health and river ecosystem service was introduced,and the river environmental policy evaluation system was established,namely,(1)the Performance Index of River Environmental Policy(PI-REP)and(2)Cost-Benefit Analysis of River Environmental Policy(CBA-REP).There are policy objective evaluation(O),policy implementation evaluation(I).and policy effectiveness evaluation(E)in PI-REP,which includes total of 36 indicators.The costs are identified in CBA-REP.including the cost of the enterprise compliance,the cost of government regulation and the cost of social welfare.The benefits are evaluated by the value of the ecosystem services,including water supply,aquatic product production,flood regulation,water quality purification and other variables.In RI-REP and CBA-REP,the meaning of each index and variable is defined and the calculation method of its specific quantization is established.A case study was conducted to evaluate the Guoyun Stream River Chief in Xiamen,a multi-level investigation was taken with,the relevant community,and the public tourists.The national,provincial,municipal and others supporting policies related to were analyzed.After the evaluation,the average score of the policy objective evaluation(O)in RI-REP was 2.07,the average score of the policy implementation evaluation(I)was 2,the average score of the policy effect evaluation(E)was 1.61.The results of the evaluation show that the Guoyun Stream River Chief has a relatively good score in terms of policy implementation and needs to be improved in policy objectives and effect.In CBA-REP,the sum of the policy benefits is 286.88 million yuan/year,the cost is 88.03 million yuan/year,the benefit-cost ratio of the policy is 3.3,the evaluation results show that in the 20-year long-term,the benefits are significantly higher than the cost of implementation,meaning from the perspective of environmental economics,the construction and management of the the Guoyun Stream River Chief is successful.The successful application in the case proves that the methodology operable and can reflect the reality objectively.In this study,a river environmental policy evaluation framework was developed which covers from internal policy to external,policy objectives to effect,policy process and linkages.The indicator evaluation system integrates both quantitative and qualitative ones of different natur.The Cost-Benefit Analysis framework covers evaluation of policy,and the efficiency of the policy.The results of this study expand the river environmental policy evaluation theory and methods,enrich the achievements of domestic river environmental policy evaluation,and can contribute to different types of environment policy evaluation.