Investigating the factors underlying participation by the Chinese public in environmental management: an approach based on spatial heterogeneity

Public participation in environmental management (PPEM) in China has become increasingly prominent; thus, investigating the factors that underlie participation by the Chinese public in environmental management is important. To this end, we adopted unique data for PPEM, which was measured based on environmental complaints logged by the telephone hotline set up by the Ministry of Ecology and Environment of China. We observed that PPEM greatly varied from one city to another, indicating significant spatial heterogeneity. In addition, complaints were mainly concentrated in four large regions, namely, the North China Plain, the Yangtze River Delta, the Pearl River Delta, and the Chengdu-Chongqing urban agglomeration. Next, a newly developed spatial heterogeneity analysis method, namely, geographical detector, was applied to investigate the driving factors of PPEM. From the factor detector analysis results, we confirmed that the economic level, energy consumption, urban population, college-educated population, wastewater, environmental risk, SO2 emissions, and PM2.5 concentrations were the dominant factors that caused citizens to voice environmental complaints. In addition, we noticed that moderately developed cities were the leading risk areas, which indicated that these cities had serious environmental pollution problems and their citizens actively voiced complaints. As economies continue to grow, the populations in these cities are projected to become more aware of environmental quality and will implement stricter regulations to protect the environment and lower complaints. Moreover, the interaction detector analysis results revealed that the interaction of urban and college-educated populations with other factors played more important roles in affecting PPEM.