The Evolution of Policy Instruments for Air Pollution Control in China: A Content Analysis of Policy Documents from 1973
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The Evolution of Policy Instruments for Air Pollution Control in China: A Content Analysis of Policy Documents from 1973 to 2016 Xinfeng Zhao1 Craig W. Thomas ●
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Tianjian Cai1
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Received: 22 July 2019 / Accepted: 28 August 2020 © Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2020
Abstract China’s portfolio of air-pollution control policy instruments has gradually broadened since the 1970s from regulatory instruments to include numerous market-based and voluntary policy instruments. We demonstrate this broadened portfolio of policy instruments for air-pollution control with a computer-assisted content analysis of 148 central-level policy documents from 1973 to 2016. We identify 20 types of policy instruments in these documents, and analyze such things as their historical evolution, main subjects, frequency of use, and whether they were issued by a single agency or jointly with other agencies. Prior research has found several factors complicating the diversification of policy instruments in China, including the late start of coordinated governance of air pollution, overreliance on regulatory instruments, insufficient use of market-based and voluntary instruments, the high cost of collecting shared information on a web-based platform, and the choice of policy instruments resulting from the “campaign-style” of governance. Given such challenges, we expected the policy documents to show little diversification of policy instruments and little coordination among agencies. The content analysis results show, however, a gradual shift from a centralized, regulatory model to an increasingly coordinated model using a diverse portfolio of policy instruments. Keywords Air-pollution control China Regulation Policy instruments ●
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Introduction China’s central government has gradually adopted a wider range of public policies for reducing air pollution. Initially, in the 1970s, air pollution was governed by centralized agencies using regulatory-policy instruments. In recent decades, however, market-based and voluntary policy instruments have also been adopted. Scholars studying Western democracies have used the term “layering” to describe the expanded use of a diverse array of policy instruments while continuing to use older instruments (Capano 2018), regardless of whether the new mix of policy instruments is optimal (Howlett and Rayner 2013). Thus, market-based and/or voluntary policy instruments can be added to a policy field (such as air-pollution control) without removing existing regulatory instruments. Air-
* Craig W. Thomas [email protected] 1
Capital Normal University, Beijing, PR China
2
University of Washington, Seattle, WA, USA
pollution policy in China provides an interesting case study because policy instrument layering has primarily been studied in Western democracies. Hence, studying China allows us to test whether layering occurs in a different political context. Thus, we examine the extent to which layering of air-pollution policy instruments has occurred in C
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