Synergistic Effect Analysis of Policy Instruments in Environmental Governance Considering the Social Context

Identifying the effective pathways and policy effects of environmental governance under the carbon neutrality goal is the scientific basis for realizing the green and low-carbon transformation of the economy and society. At present, there is a lack of research on the effectiveness of environmental policy instruments from the perspective of synergistic effects, especially the similarities and differences in the use of policy instruments for pollution-control and carbon-abatement. By using fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA) and econometric regression model we take 29 provincial-level administrative regions in China as an example. In this paper we assess the synergistic effects between policy instruments and between policy instrument combinations and social contexts in the field of environmental governance in each province since 2006. Then an effective policy implementation pathway of instrument combination for environmental governance has been proposed. The study shows that: (1) Any combination of policy instruments is not a sufficient condition for high environmental performance, and sometimes they only serve as peripheral conditions to match the social context in which they are located to produce high governance performance. (2) For regions with low pollution severity and high innovation motivation, government does not need to consider the characteristics of the governance instrument itself as any instrument can achieve high performance. However, for regions with high pollution severity and low innovation motivation, the government's attitude towards environmental governance can affect the effectiveness of the policy instruments. When the determination of government governance is insufficient, regulatory instruments and information provision instruments play a leading role; on the contrary, more policy instruments (such as market instruments and technology adoption subsidy instruments), including innovation support instruments, should be used to achieve higher governance goals. (3) Although the feasibility of synergistic governance between pollution-control and carbon-abatement is high, the requirement for policy instruments still differs between the two. Finally, we use the econometric regression method to verify and expand the above conclusions and point out the similarities and differences between the fsQCA and econometric regression method in terms of variable explanation. This will provide empirical support for expanding the theoretical analysis of environmental governance methods.