new paper: transparency improves environmental governance

[Mark Buntaine]

Dear colleagues,

Mengdi Liu, Sarah Anderson, Bing Zhang, and I want to share a recent paper on the consequences of governmental transparency for environmental governance. Many scholars are interested in how transparency shapes governance and environmental outcomes. We contend that it is often difficult to disentangle the role of transparency in environmental governance because governments or firms that perform well have more reasons to be transparent about it. In a multi-year follow-up of a randomized trial in China, we find that cities that were encouraged to become more transparent through a publicity treatment increased inspections, reduced pollution violations, and improved air quality. We hope these results will be broadly relevant to scholars interested in the role of transparency in environmental governance.

Open-access paper here: https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2406761122

All the best,
Mark

Mark T. Buntaine

Professor

Bren School of Environmental Science and Management

Department of Political Science (affiliate)

University of California, Santa Barbara

https://mbuntaine.wordpress.com/