Assessing provincial environment governance efficiency in China: A multi-agents participation perspective

Effective environmental systems have been recognized as essential to achieving sustainable development. Existing research on enhancing the effectiveness of environmental systems has predominantly focused on the improvement of various environmental governance measures, neglecting the differences in governance effects among different agents in environmental governance. Taking China as an example, we study the environmental governance efficiency (EGE) of four agents including central government, local government, enterprises, and the public. To reflect the characteristics of China’s environmental governance system, namely, the government takes the lead and enterprises and the public participate together, a nested leader-follower game network data envelopment analysis is proposed. The results of 30 provinces from 2009 to 2018 show that although China’s average EGE has improved, it is only 0.528 in 2018, with a large room for improvement. Moreover, the gap of EGEs among areas is gradually increasing, especially between the eastern area and the middle and western areas. Furthermore, the gap among provinces in the eastern area has narrowed, while the opposite is true in the western area. Finally, the EGE of the central government in most provinces is consistent with that of the local government. However, there are only 7 provinces whose EGEs of four agents are above the average. The policy recommendations are proposed accordingly.