Science Research Management ›› 2022, Vol. 43 ›› Issue (6): 84-93.

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How to solve the dilemma of campaign-style governance in implementation of environmental policies—— A configuration-based study

Sun Yan,Zhang Bei   

  1. Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, Dalian University of Technology, Dalian 116024, Liaoning, China
  • Received:2021-09-28 Revised:2022-03-24 Online:2022-06-20 Published:2022-06-21

Abstract:     How to remove the disadvantage of campaign-style governance is the focus of environmental policy implementation. Based on the inspection by central ecology and environmental protection authority, after a major reform measure is put forward to promote ecological civilization construction, this paper selects 40 typical failures and excellent cases under the central ecological and environmental protection inspections announced by the Ministry of Ecology and Environment, and constructs an analysis framework for local government policy implementation that meets the actual situation of the central ecology and environmental protection inspection by taking the complexity of the problem, the number of target groups, the policy implementation network, the resource status, leadership concern, public concern and internal supervision as the condition variables, and the effective implementation and ineffective implementation of policies as the result variables. The NCA and fsQCA methods are used jointly to analyze the multiple paths for the effective implementation of environmental policies. The research results are as follows:
     (1) The analysis of the necessary conditions found that the special actions, the attention of municipal leaders, and the special group are the necessary conditions for the effective implementation of policies under the central ecology and environmental protection inspection, and the analysis results further affirm the importance of campaign-style governance to the effective implementation of environmental policies.
     (2) After configuration analysis, three paths for the effective implementation of policies were found. The first path is: in the face of more complex environmental problems, in the case of insufficient government environmental protection expenditure, it is possible to increase the attention of leaders, adopt strict internal supervision, and supplement it with the necessary departmental cooperation to promote the effective implementation of environmental policies, while public concern plays little role in it, and summarizes it as an "internal-driving model". The second path is: for environmental problems involving a large number of target groups, it is possible to promote the effective implementation of environmental policies by increasing the attention of leaders and adopting strict internal and external supervision measures, while environmental protection expenditure is unnecessary. It′s summarized as a "collaborative-driven model". The third path is: for environmental problems with low complexity and more target groups, governments with insufficient environmental expenditure can promote the effective implementation of environmental policies through strong internal and external supervision and build policy implementation network, which can be summarized as a "supervision-driven model". Through the horizontal comparison between the three paths, internal supervision and policy implementation networks appear in the three paths, so local governments should pay attention to strengthening internal supervision and network construction in the process of promoting the effective implementation of policies. The resource status appears in the three paths as a missing condition and an unimportant condition, which further highlights that the role of institutional design in environmental governance is more vital than the investment of government funds.
      (3) After the analysis of the substitution relationship, it is found that the different attributes of environmental problems will trigger the substitution relationship between the attention of the leader and the public concern, the environmental problems with higher complexity should play the role of the leadership attention, and the environmental problems with lower complexity and more target groups should play a more important role of the public. 
     (4) Combined with the analysis results, this paper further summarizes the logic of the effective implementation of local environmental policies under the central ecology and environmental protection inspection: "passive opening-problem identification and strategy matching - continuous follow-up".
    The paper further points out that for the current environmental governance of local governments, it is necessary to reasonably match policy implementation tools from the perspective of problems, break the inertia of environmental policy implementation with the help of campaign-style tools in the process of policy implementation, use regular governance means to ensure the sustainability of environmental policy implementation, strengthen the supervision of policy implementation, and ensure the standardization and legalization of policy implementation. Furthermore, local governments should gradually get rid of the government′s top-down control thinking pattern in environmental governance, actively cooperate with various departments and strive to build a new situation of environmental governance with pluralistic co-governance, to solve the problems of the campaign-style governance and truly achieve the coordination of development and protection.

Key words: central inspection on eco-environmental protection, environmental policy implementation, campaign-style governance, fsQCA