A tripartite game analysis of public participation in environmental regulation of ionic rare earth mining areas

The environmental problems in mining areas caused by rare earth mining have a serious impact on local economic development and social life. This paper constructs a tripartite evolutionary game model of local government, rare earth enterprises, and the public to address the implementation of environmental regulations in rare earth mining areas. The study is based on the finite rationality of evolutionary games and considers the public as one of the participants to analyze the behavioral strategy choice and mutual influence mechanism of each participating subject in different situations. The results show that local governments, rare earth enterprises, and the public mutually influence and constrain each other in the whole game system, and the strategic choice of any one of them will affect the other two. Without relying on the power of public scrutiny, environmental regulation by local governments alone has certain effects in the short term but cannot stop environmental damage by enterprises in the long term. Additionally, public scrutiny is identified as the key factor in eliminating corporate violations, and the effect of joint government and public scrutiny is better than public scrutiny alone. Based on the above findings, some recommendations are then made from the perspectives of local governments, rare earth enterprises, and the public to provide decision-making support for promoting the sustainable development of the rare earth industry.