Environmental NGOs and Unintended Consequences of Co-production

• In Event: Co-production of Public Services

Abstract

Termination—the reversal of government functions, policies, programs, or organizations—is an integral component of the policy cycle (Brewer 1978; Brewer and deLeon 1983; Kaufman 1976). However, little work has systematically assessed the process and mechanism that explain why some local governments reverse their policy, while others do not. In particular, few insights are available into how theoretical mechanisms found in western contexts can be applied to other national contexts, especially in the authoritarian system. How does coproduction of nongovernmental organizations influence government decisions about whether to terminate a policy?

This article proposes a theory to address this question by studying the consequences of nongovernmental organization (NGO) coproduction on the reversal process of drinking water protection zone policy in China. In authoritarian regimes like China that are closed to lobbying, NGO coproduction shapes policy outcomes and public goods provision through distinct mechanisms. The functions of these NGOs are typically collaboration or coproduction rather than political opposition. Therefore, the mechanism through which NGOs influence governments to end policies or programs cannot be explained by existing termination theories, which focus on political interactions between bureaucratic agencies and interest groups. In contrast to existing literature, our study addresses this question by focusing on the “information intermediaries” role, rather than social mobilization and political lobbying of NGOs in local environmental governance.

We argue that the role of NGOs is to monitor environmental performance during environmental governance process. Most of the co-production and collaborative governance literature assumes that the goals of NGOs and governments are consistent, leading to positive environmental outcomes. This assumption may or may not hold, depending largely on the motivation of local governments. In the conventional western context, it can be argued that local governments with more participation of NGOs are likely to enforce central policy goals of environmental governance and sustain environmental-protection programs, because NGOs will serve as an interest group of local citizens. Contrary to this, the authoritarian context of China might lead us to a different story. The pollution information from NGOs might drive local governments to deviate from central policy goals and terminate the environmental-protection programs to avoid punishment by central governments. In this condition, NGO coproduction leads to negative environmental policy consequences shown as policy reversals.

A crucial implication of our theoretical argument is that local termination patterns in response to the coproduction of NGOs are contingent on local governments’ pro-growth motives. Based on the premise of goal alignment between nongovernmental coproducers and governments, the participation of NGOs should have a stronger anti-termination impact on potential policy reversals as pro-growth motives of local government become stronger. In the authoritarian context, we propose that only local governments with weak pro-growth motives, tend to respond to the information provided by NGOs by maintaining current status quo, because their balance between economic development and environmental protection allows them to take a pause and focus on fixing the environmental problems at hand.

To test these claims, we examine factors that drive Chinese cities’ choice of policy reversals in the context of water source governance. Seeing the growing social unrest associated with drinking water pollution, the Chinese central government established and implemented Drinking Water Source Protection Zones (DWSPZs) at the local level across the country. However, after a few years of implementation of DWSPZ, China has witnessed increasing removals of polluted DWSPZs in many cities. Using administrative data on economic performance gap (gaps between performance and aspiration) and terminations decisions, as well as web-scrapped data on environmental NGOs for Chinese cities between 2005 and 2018, we examine the link between coproduction and termination as well as the moderating effect of local governments’ pro-growth incentives. We find support for the ‘dark side’ of co-production by showing that termination is more likely for cities with greater NGOs participation. Linking variations in NGOs’ activities to an original data set of government economic growth targets, we further show that in response to the coproduction from NGOs, termination is more likely for cities with stronger pro-growth motives, but is less likely for cities with weak pro-growth motives. The results demonstrate that although NGOs make useful information available to governments, different motivations between NGOs and governments may impede the achievement of good policy outcomes.

Authors

• Juan Du, East China Normal University

• Hongtao Yi, The Ohio State University