Village clans and rural households' willingness to participate in domestic waste governance: Evidence from China

Rural domestic waste seriously damages the village environment and the health of villagers, and it is difficult to rely only on the government and the market for effective governance, so there is an urgent need to incorporate the village endogenous power into the domestic waste governance. Using a panel dataset of China Labor-force Dynamics Survey from 2014 to 2016, the article constructs an analytical framework based on self-governance theory, and employs an instrumental variable approach to examine the effect of village clans on rural households' willingness to participate in domestic waste governance. We find that village clans have a significant positive effect on rural households' willingness to participate in domestic waste governance, which is stronger when grassroots governments implement incentive environmental regulation. The underlying mechanism is that common rules and reciprocity embodied in village clans increase rural households' collective actions. Further analysis shows that low degree of clan diversity significantly promotes rural households’ willingness to participate in domestic waste governance. This paper offers valuable references to realise a rural environmental governance system based on the benign interaction between governmental governance, social regulation and residents' self-governance.