The occurrence mechanism for local governments’ overregulation: evidence from central environmental protection inspection

Excessive environmental regulation can achieve environmental improvement, but it is not conducive to sustainable environmental improvement. This paper takes the “one-size-fits-all” (OFA) in the process of China’s central environmental protection inspection (CEPI) as an example to explore the occurrence mechanism from the perspective of multiple co-governance. Using the fuzzy set qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA), we find that four distinct mechanisms can result in OFA. Based on the four distinct mechanisms, we find that even if the pollution behavior of enterprises is not serious, local governments may still adopt OFA under a combination of other conditions; non-key cities of environmental protection are more prone to OFA; giving full play to the role of public inspection is a key step to avoiding local government violations. However, the effectiveness of public environmental attention is insufficient under the dual driving force of pollution and the economy under the lack of vertical environmental regulatory pressure.