Research On Regional Environmental Governance From The Background Of Ecological Safety

In recent years,as China’s economy has entered a period of stable and rapid development with more emphasis on quality,the status of environmental security construction in China’s modernization process has become increasingly prominent.The realization of the goal of "clear water and green mountains" depends on theoretical responses and practical solutions to environmental security problems such as serious resource and environmental pollution and ecosystem degradation.The key to grasp "clear water and green mountains are gold and silver mountains" is to realize the decoupling of environmental pollution and economic development,so that the protection of environmental security and local economic development form a mutually promoting benign mechanism.For a long time,China’s extensive economic development mode has not been in direct proportion to the input and output of environmental governance.As for the input and output of environmental governance,the academic circle has decided to use the efficiency of environmental governance as a key indicator.Improving the efficiency of environmental governance in various localities is the key to achieving the win-win goal of economic development and environmental security protection.Under the theoretical framework of political centralization and fiscal decentralization in China,improving the efficiency of environmental governance through institutional design is a hot topic concerned by scholars.In May 2020,the State Council issued the Reform Plan on the Division of Fiscal Authority and Expenditure Responsibility between the central and local governments in the field of Ecological Environment,which further clarified the fiscal authority and responsibility attribution between the central and local governments in environmental governance.Under the governance model with Chinese characteristics of fiscal decentralization and political centralization,the government’s expenditure behavior will directly affect the investment level and governance efficiency of environmental governance.Therefore,optimizing the structure of fiscal decentralization and reasonably guiding the environmental governance behavior of local governments will also become an important train of thought for improving the efficiency of environmental governance in China.In addition,due to the differences in the efficiency of local environmental governance caused by the different characteristics of economic development in different regions of China,as well as the externality of environmental pollution itself,local governments not only actively allocate local resources to deal with environmental problems,but also seek external cooperation to solve the governance dilemma.Urban agglomeration is the main spatial carrier of regional development,and the collaborative linkage of public affairs such as environmental governance within urban agglomeration is also the core content of regional governance of urban agglomeration.Inspired by the theory of fiscal decentralization and the environmental governance system of regional cooperation,this paper incorporated China’s special fiscal decentralization system and regional cooperation environmental governance model with urban agglomeration as the carrier into the econometric model,and analyzed the mechanism of action between fiscal revenue/expenditure decentralization,intergovernmental cooperation and local environmental governance efficiency.Based on the Yangtze river Delta Urban Agglomeration,and,BJ-TJ-HB Urban Agglomeration,the Pearl river Delta Urban Agglomerations in 2008-2017 panel data to construct Tobit panel model to test this paper empirical assumptions,and according to the local economic development level and pollutants emission intensity for grouping different cities to return,to examine fiscal decentralization and the cooperation between the government’s influence on environmental governance efficiency exists significant spatial heterogeneity.Finally,quantile regression and variable substitution were used to further verify the robustness of main effect regression results.The main findings of this paper are as follows :(1)fiscal revenue decentralization and fiscal expenditure decentralization in three urban agglomerations have significant positive effects on environmental governance efficiency.However,only the Yangtze River Delta city clusters show that the intergovernmental cooperation in environmental governance has significantly promoted the environmental governance efficiency,and the intergovernmental cooperation in The Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei region and the Pearl River Delta city clusters need to be further strengthened to improve the environmental governance efficiency.(2)The empirical results of the three urban agglomerations all show that there is no significant interaction between fiscal decentralization and intergovernmental cooperation,and that intergovernmental cooperation has no significant regulatory effect on fiscal decentralization.(3)Further heterogeneity analysis is made on the samples of the three urban agglomerations.The results show that,under the influence of urban economic development level and pollutant emission intensity,the samples of urban agglomerations in the Yangtze River Delta and the Pearl River Delta show significant spatial heterogeneity in the impact of fiscal decentralization and intergovernmental cooperation on environmental governance efficiency,while there is no significant heterogeneity in the Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei agglomeration.In general,in terms of the study of fiscal decentralization system and intergovernmental cooperation on local environmental governance in China,this paper has theoretical significance and empirical contribution to the design,responding to the topic of improving the efficiency of environmental governance through decentralization system design.Under the framework of the classical fiscal decentralization theory,we combine the existing research and conclude the two viewpoints of "race to the bottom" and "race to the top" existing in China.Through empirical analysis,it is found that fiscal decentralization has a significant promoting effect on the improvement of environmental governance efficiency.Secondly,in the framework of inter-governmental cooperation,this paper verifies various viewpoints of governmental cooperation on environmental governance through three city clusters.Based on the urban data,it provides a research perspective of intergovernmental cooperation for studying the relationship between fiscal decentralization and environmental governance.