Centralization or Decentralization of Environmental Governance—Evidence from China

From the perspective of environmental federalism, we extracted the environmental intention words from the work reports of China’s central and provincial governments through data mining, and used the instrumental variable method to conduct empirical experiments concerning the dispute between centralization and decentralization of environmental governance in the Chinese context. The results suggest that a negative correlation exists between the intention of the central government’s environmental governance and the provincial environmental quality, whereas a positive correlation exists between the intention of the provincial government and the provincial environmental quality. Our interpretation is that environmental centralization, coupled with its political, economic, and cultural factors, has converted provincial governments into supporters of environmental pollution, and that the central government’s ongoing environmental protection inspection campaign has forced the provincial government to be somewhat effective. We propose establishing Chinese-style cooperative federalism in environmental authority and not only centralizing or decentralizing in one direction. New transition mechanisms for the central government’s authority should be implemented, such as the environmental protection inspection groups mechanism and the ecological gross domestic product based political tournament.