Understanding Environmental Governance in China Through the Green Shield Action Campaign

ABSTRACTChina’s Green Shield Action (GSA) campaign provides critical insights into the nature of environmental politics during a campaign-style inspection under an authoritarian regime. Based on fieldwork in Fujian from 2019 to 2022, the dynamic interactions among stakeholders, the role of campaigns in environmental governance, and the logic behind policy formulation, implementation, and revision were explored. This study finds that in the campaign-style inspection, by applying new technology and improved management, less room was left for local governments to make trade-offs and dilemmas, which further caused high political pressure and conflicts. These outcomes were used as a reference for the central government to adjust its policies and implement regular enforcement with an improved environmental governance system. The campaign-style enforcement is not the opposite of regular enforcement, but these two are closely connected in the case of the GSA.KEYWORDS: Campaign-styleenvironmental inspectioncentral-local relationshipecological protectionecological civilization AcknowledgmentsThe authors gratefully acknowledge the participants of this study for their insights and sharing their opinions. The authors are grateful to Dr. Kevin Lo and three anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments on an earlier draft of this article.Disclosure statementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).Notes1 Sam Geall and Adrian Ely, ‘Narratives and Pathways Towards an Ecological Civilization in Contemporary China’, China Quarterly 236, (2018), p. 1175. https://doi.org/10.1017/S03057410180013152 Jonas Geldmann, Lauren Coad, Megan Barnes, Ian D. Craigie, Marc Hockings, Kathryn Knights, Fiona Leverington, Ivon C. Cuadros, Camilo Zamora, Stephen Woodley and Neil D. 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