Coupling of problems, political attention, policies and institutional conditions: Explaining the performance of environmental targets in the national five-year plans in China

Abstract

A conceptual framework combining the Multiple Streams Approach and the policy implementation theory was used to explain variations of environmental target performance in China. This paper suggests that strong political attention is not a necessary condition for high target performance, and favorable institutional context may play a decisive role in facilitating performance when political attention is missing. The study concludes that if there is a good fit of policy to problem, but an absence of political attention, high performance is likely to be achieved when the institutional context is hierarchical and centralized, or when goals are aligned in the context that is decentralized.