Assessment of China’s green governance performance based on integrative perspective of technology utilization and actor management

ABSTRACT Green governance contributes to a coordinated approach to the sustainable development of an economy, society and the environment. Assessing green governance performance is a hot topic, because it lays a foundation for exploring the improvement of green governance performance. However, most studies in this field actually replaced the green governance performance with technology utilization performance of green governance and ignored the importance of actor management to green governance performance, leading to the inaccuracy of green governance performance. By integrating the advantages of super efficiency network structure and a secondary relative benefit model with data envelopment analysis, this study meets the challenge to assess China’s green governance performance from the integrative perspective of technology utilization and actor management. The results showed that China’s green governance performance has a trend towards improvement but the increase was slight. Moreover, both technology utilization and actor management performances can promote the improvement of green governance performance. However, the improvement of green governance performance largely relies on the technology utilization, the importance of actor management to the improvement of green governance permanence has not yet receive enough attention. Policy implication are put forward accordingly to promote the green governance performance. This work not only enriches the related research results and provides methodological reference for performance assessment of socio-technical systems, but also guides the practice of China’s green governance.