Collaboration, accountability pressure, and local air pollution governance: evidence from China

Although a stringent top-down performance-based accountability system remains a key characteristic of China’s environmental governance, collaborative action across jurisdictions has quickly become another highly important feature of local environmental governance that offers capacity pooling and flexible governing structures to address cross-jurisdictional environmental issues such as air pollution. How does control-oriented performance accountability pressure interact with local cross-jurisdictional collaborations to influence environmental outcomes? Drawing from the latest collaborative governance literature and employing panel data from major cities from 2013 to 2020, we establish that collaboration has a significant and persistent influence on local governments’ air pollution abatement, and—importantly—we discover that accountability pressure moderates this relationship in certain institutional circumstances. The accountability pressure—created through performance rankings and environmental inspections undertaken by the central government—can motivate poor-performing local governments to take advantage of collaboration to improve their environmental outcomes. Accountability pressure, however, has no visible impact on high-performing governments’ environmental outcomes. We discuss the theoretical and policy implications of these findings.