Coordination of interests between local environmental protection departments and enterprises under China’s environmental regulation policies: an evolutionary game theoretical approach

The Central Inspection for Ecological and Environmental Protection ( CIEEP ) and Environmental Vertical Management Reform ( EVMR ) policies have reshaped the relationships among stakeholders and the power structure in local environmental governance systems. To reveal the current local environmental collaborative governance mechanism, this study placed CIEEP and EVMR policies within the same research framework and considered multiple governance entities, including the central government, higher-level environmental protection departments, local environmental protection departments, enterprises, and the public, employing evolutionary game theory and numerical simulation techniques to explore the boundary conditions, key influencing factors, influence mechanisms, and realization paths of local environmental collaborative governance from a dynamic process perspective. The results show that: 1) The cost of enterprise environmental behavior, intensity of reward and punishment for enterprise environmental behavior, government subsidies, supervision cost of local environmental protection departments, and intensity of reward and punishment for local environmental protection departments all have important effects on local environmental governance; 2) Compared with the cost of enterprise environmental behavior, enterprise environmental behavior is more sensitive to changes in supervision cost of local environmental protection departments, and the intensity of reward and punishment for enterprise environmental behavior has the same major impact on enterprise environmental behavior as that of local environmental protection departments; 3) The influence of CIEEP policy on enterprise environmental behavior is unstable, showing signs of strategic response. Therefore, local environmental governance systems should be further optimized by encouraging local environmental protection departments to actively supervise and designing differentiated policy tools. This study provides a reference for solving local environmental governance problems under current environmental regulation policies.