School of Management, Lanzhou University, Lanzhou City, 730000, P.R. China.
Department of Public Policy, City University of Hong Kong, Kowloon, Hong Kong SAR, P.R. China.
J Environ Manage. 2020 Jan 1;253:109698. doi: 10.1016/j.jenvman.2019.109698. Epub 2019 Nov 5.
The significant role of high-quality data in environmental policymaking has led to the Chinese central government's concrete efforts to improve its monitoring system, which had long been plagued with data manipulation by local governments. The most remarkable policy innovation of the last decade in this area has been the introduction of a critical external oversight-profit-making third-party organizations-by the central government to monitor local governments' environmental performance. Despite the significance of third-party environmental monitoring, little is known about its effectiveness in improving data accuracy and whether and how it brings about changes to China's environmental governance. Framed within the literature on China's intergovernmental relationship and adopting a regression discontinuity model with a national database of air quality, this study examines whether third-party monitoring improves the accuracy of environmental data in China, and if so, how this approach can remedy the problem of data manipulation. Results show that data accuracy has been improved after the involvement of third-party organizations, providing evidence that supports China's efforts to advance its environmental governance from a mono-centric and non-participatory policy process to one that integrates both authoritarian control and market-based mechanisms. We discuss policy implications of this finding for environmental governance in China.
高质量数据在环境政策制定中的重要作用促使中国中央政府切实努力改善其监测系统，长期以来，地方政府一直存在数据操纵问题。在这一领域，过去十年最显著的政策创新是中央政府引入了具有关键外部监督作用的盈利性第三方组织，以监测地方政府的环境绩效。尽管第三方环境监测意义重大，但人们对其提高数据准确性的有效性知之甚少，也不清楚它是否以及如何改变中国的环境治理。本文借鉴了中国政府间关系的文献，采用带有全国空气质量数据库的回归不连续模型，研究了第三方监测是否能提高中国环境数据的准确性，如果能，这种方法如何能解决数据操纵问题。研究结果表明，第三方组织介入后，数据准确性得到了提高，这为支持中国从单一中心和非参与性政策进程向整合权威控制和基于市场的机制的环境治理迈进提供了证据。我们讨论了这一发现对中国环境治理的政策意义。
