Textual Analysis of China’s Environmental Policies from the Perspective of Policy Instruments

Abstract

Environmental governance cannot be separated from scientific and rational policy guidelines, and content analysis of environmental governance policy texts helps to understand the characteristics of existing policies and improve policy design. Using policy bibliometric and content analysis, this study analyses the environmental governance policy texts issued by China’s central government from 2018 to 2023, constructs an analytical framework that combines types of policy instruments and environmental governance cycles, and is devoted to exploring the key hotspots, design features, and development logics of the policy system. The study finds that China’s environmental governance policy instruments show characteristics of the synergistic development of diversified regulatory instruments, but focus on the use of environmentally based policy instruments, with relatively few supply-based and demand-based policy instruments. Furthermore, they focus on the prevention of environmental pollution in advance, with relatively little attention paid to post-pollution governance and the construction of the governance guarantee system, and the use of economic instruments remains limited. Accordingly, this paper puts forward relevant policy recommendations to provide valuable reference and guidance for the future development of China’s environmental governance.