Multilevel governments' decision-making process and its influencing factors in watershed ecological compensation

Abstract

Transboundary water pollution is a long-standing problem in China, although the Chinese government has been committed to the protection of water resources. Due to the different interests of multilevel governments and the regionalization of management, there is still no unified plan to solve the transboundary water pollution in China. Watershed ecological compensation as a holistic plan to deal with transboundary water pollution is being promoted currently. Taking the South-to-North Water Transfer Project' eastern route as an example, this paper firstly analyses stakeholders' strategies and establishes a tripartite game model based on evolutionary game theory. Secondly, by introducing Cobb Douglas production function creatively, the supervision level of the central government is refined into supervisory attitude and supervisory skills. Thirdly, the numerical simulation is used to analyze the sensitivity of influencing factors. The results show that: (1) whether the central government supervises the local governments mainly depends on the benefits of water environment improvement and supervision costs; (2) the initial negotiation plan of the stakeholders has a significant impact on their optimum strategies; (3) the fines imposed by the central government on the local governments have a small impact on the stable state of the system; (4) the higher the eco-compensation fee, the lower their likelihood of cooperation; (5) the central government's supervisory attitude and supervisory skills have significant effect on the sustainability of the optimum arrangement, even when willingness of upstream and downstream governments to cooperate is low; (6) the initial ecological benefits of downstream governments have no effect on the optimum strategy. Therefore, considering these insights is helpful to improve the watershed ecological compensation mechanism in order to solve transboundary water pollution and achieve the sustainability of water resources.