Longitudinal Inquiry into Public Sentiments on Environmental Governance in China

• In Event: Environmental Governance in China

Abstract

China plays a pivotal role as a participant and stakeholder in global environmental governance, with its environmental initiatives aiming to garner worldwide recognition and satisfy its populace. The latter is closely tied to its performance legitimacy. With rapid industrialization and urbanization, environmental governance has become a focal point in China's national development strategy. The comprehensive examination of the public's subjective perceptions and the temporal changes in environmental governance holds both theoretical and practical significance. Existing research often decodes public perceptions of environmental governance based on specific time periods, notably lacking in longitudinal discussions.
This study delves into the trends in public satisfaction with environmental governance in China, utilizing national survey data from 2006 to 2021. A Bayesian Age-Period-Cohort (APC) model is employed to assess these trends and multiple robustness tests are conducted to address identification problem related to the APC model.
The analysis reveals several key findings. Firstly, as the public's age increases, their satisfaction with environmental governance also rises (age effect). Secondly, over time, there is a general upward trend in public satisfaction with environmental governance, with 2013 being a turning point where satisfaction shifts from a decline to an increase (period effect). Lastly, there is differentiation in satisfaction among generations, with significantly lower satisfaction among those born in the 1980s and 1990s, and significantly higher satisfaction among those born in the 2000s (cohort effect).
This study evaluates the public perceptions of China's long-term environmental governance efforts at the domestic level, enriching the literature on environmental politics with regard to measuring changes in individual opinions over time. The findings hold significant theoretical value and provide policy insights for systematically understanding the public's subjective evaluations of environmental governance performance.

Authors

• Jiangrui Liu, Chongqing University

• Hui Yang, Tsinghua University