Impact of Social Capital on Environmental Governance Efficiency—Behavior of Guangdong, China

The main purpose of this article is to investigate the impact of social capital level on environmental governance efficiency in economically developed areas. We choose China’s richest province Guangdong. Compared with other Chinese provinces, Guangdong’s local governments are in better fiscal status, and they can allocate environmental spending in line with the trend of gross domestic product per capita. We want to observe the important factors related to social cognition other than capital investment to gain a more profound influence on the efficiency of local environmental governance. This article assumes that the degree of local social capital will have a great positive impact on the efficiency of regional environmental governance. Super-efficiency slacks-based measure method of data envelopment analysis is adopted to calculate the environmental governance efficiency by considering the expected output and the nonexpected output. Then, short-panel regression was used to analyze the relationship between social capital and environmental governance efficiency. Through an empirical analysis of urban panel data of Guangdong province from 2001 to 2019, it is found that the degree of social capital does have a significant positive impact on the efficiency of local environmental governance. After the research conclusion, we propose some policy suggestions to local governments.

The Changing Factors Affecting Local Environmental Governance in China: Evidence from a Study of Prefecture-Level Cities in Guangdong Province

This paper aims to examine the changing factors underlying China’s environmental governance, by investigating the long-term dynamic impacts of related endogenous and exogenous factors and considering regional differences in these factors. The study estimated environmental regulation intensity and employed the geographical detector technique to analyze its driving factors, based on 21 prefecture-level cities in Guangdong Province, China, from 1990 to 2016. The results showed that environmental regulation intensity has increased in Guangdong Province over the past 27 years. The results also indicated that local environmental governance was affected by global–local interactions and changed based on different regional developmental phases. At first, factors within a region affected local environmental policies more significantly, such as economic development and urbanization. However, in the long run, globalization’s impacts have been the most important factors influencing environmental governance. Further analysis showed that environmental regulation intensity in Guangdong Province’s different regions was affected by different driven factors. Our analyses contribute to the understanding of China’s environmental governance and have policy implications for environmental problem management and China’s construction of an ecological civilization.

Local environmental governance and policy implementation: Variegated environmental education in three districts in Tianjin, China

Variation in the implementation of environmental policies in urban China has received widespread scholarly attention, but the extensive heterogeneity in local governance frameworks has remained under-studied. Leaning on the abundant, new institutionalism theory, this article suggests that the concept of institutional configuration can bring structure to the analysis of local complex governance frameworks and help identify factors that create different approaches to environmental policies. This study analyses the construction of approaches to new environmental education policies in three urban districts in Tianjin to illustrate how the suggested conceptual framework applies to centrally administered Chinese cities. The findings show that different combinations of formal and socio-cultural factors emerge as decisive in the institutional configuration of each district. This study also reveals new interesting nuances in the motivations behind environmental policy implementation.