Evaluating the effects of campaign-style environmental governance: evidence from Environmental Protection Interview in China

Campaign-style governance is one of the political methods adopted by the Communist Party of China and the Chinese government, which is usually used to make up for shortcomings when regular governance policies fail because the defined tasks are incompatible with other policy goals, especially in the field of environmental governance. An Environmental Protection Interview (EPI) is one of the campaign-style environmental governance methods that target local officials. In this paper, the causal relationship between the implementation of EPI and pollutant emission reduction was confirmed using the method of Time-Varying Difference-in-difference (Time-Varying DID) to compensate for endogeneity problem and ensure that the results are still valid after several robustness checks. Our regional heterogeneous analysis shows that the policy effects of EPI decrease from east to west in China and that they have different emission reduction effects on various types of pollutants. Unfortunately, the results also suggest that policy implementation only temporarily affects pollutant emission reduction, which could be attributed to the governance approaches of campaign-style enforcement according to the impact mechanism analysis. This paper implies that the EPI should be continued to be implemented in the future with some improvements on pollutant reduction mechanisms to ensure effective adoption.