Consistency between Environmental Performance and Public Satisfaction and Their Planning Intervention Strategies: A Policy Text Analysis of Urban Environmental Planning

Abstract

The Chinese government has been working hard to improve environmental performance. However, considering that public feedback is not always complimentary, there is still room for improvement in its protection work. In China, environmental planning is the dominant direction of the government’s environmental governance. Therefore, an analysis of environmental planning could explain the policy incentives that lead to inconsistent performance and satisfaction, and could enable us to explore how to improve planning to more effectively achieve environmental governance goals. This study classified 37 Chinese cities into four types based on consistency in performance and satisfaction. Taking environmental planning policy as the research object, the planning work arrangements of different cities to improve environmental performance and public satisfaction were analyzed through hand-coding. Our study found that environmental planning in these cities puts more emphasis on basic and engineering arrangements that can effectively improve environmental performance, while work arrangements that involve improving public environmental satisfaction are relatively few. Moreover, (1) cities with high environmental performance and high public satisfaction have made relatively substantial arrangements in improving environmental performance and satisfaction during environmental planning; (2) cities with high environmental performance and low public satisfaction have a certain foundation for environmental governance, but tough governance or high public expectations weaken environmental satisfaction; (3) cities with low environmental performance and high public environmental satisfaction have low environmental performance values due to the huge energy consumption of resources or a lack of pollution disposal capacity; and (4) most of the cities with low environmental performance and low public environmental satisfaction share common geographical and historical environmental problems that make it challenging to considerably enhance public satisfaction and environmental performance in the short term. Based on the above findings, this paper believes that greater environmental governance can be achieved by promoting a change in environmental planning from the existing “elite” planning paradigm to a “participatory” planning model.

Can Farmers’ Satisfaction with Green Production Policies Be Explained by Policy Structure and Policy Implementation? Evidence from China

“…According to the concept of satisfaction, subjective satisfaction is often the subjective feeling generated by comparing one's own expectations of a certain thing with reality [18,23]. For example, Bahtiar et al [24] investigated the satisfaction of farmers with adopting new superior varieties.…”

“…The success of agricultural policies depends not only on the implementation environment, but also mainly on the intensity of the response of farmers to policy stimuli [17]. In recent years, the focus of evaluating the effectiveness of policy implementation has gradually expanded from traditional material welfare and economic development to people's subjective welfare [16,18,19]. In the literature on subjective well-being, subjective satisfaction has been an important indicator by which to measure the level of individual welfare; thus, policy satisfaction provides a means by which to measure the welfare effect of agricultural policies [20,21].…”