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| The Impact of “National Health City” Brand on Local Governments’ Environmental Governance: A Quasi-natural Experimental Study |
| Hu Chong1, Wang Shizong1,2, Song Wenhao1 |
1.School of Public Affairs, Zhejiang University, Hangzhou 310058, China
2.Academy of Social Governance, Zhejiang University, Hangzhou 310058, China |
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Abstract The branding operation of the public sector is a new trend in local governance. Previous studies hold typically that the brand itself is a goal rather than a tool, which tends to treat the brand as an “answer sheet” for “public perception management”. However, the international research in recent years has shown that the brand is also of great value for local governments to promote governance activities. These observations lead us to explore a rarely touched topic: the governance function of public brands themselves in the Chinese context, and their significance for improving local governance capabilities and promoting the modernization of national governance system and capability. To investigate this issue, we study the quasi-natural experiment of “National Health City”, a compelling city brand in the governance practice with Chinese characteristics.The research results of this article confirm the governance value of the city brand as a symbolic structure, which has multiple policy implications for government governance. Firstly, this article provides an important basis for the local government to regard brand building as an important tool instead of an ultimate goal. The brand is not only a recognition of the performance in building a health city, but also prompts the local government to think of the core environmental pollution control issues through improving urban health, the living environment. This has significant reference value for the improvement of government governance. On the one hand, the high-level government should award local the government with a brand when the city meets the requirements, which can expand the governance effect of the local government. On the other hand, local governments should strive to build reputation assets belonging to the region in the urban development. Secondly, the successful creation of a brand obviously does not guarantee effective governance. The governance effect of a brand depends on continuous reputation management. Thirdly, cities with different characteristics should adopt differentiated brand strategies.City brands has three main functions building the region’s image, facilitating the local government’s reputation management, and creating and maintaining interactions in the governance network. Therefore, there are three main intermediate mechanisms that make the “National Health City” brand promote environmental governance: incentives, restraints and mobilization. Further empirical research shows that the “National Health City” brand has significantly reduced the discharge of industrial wastewater and the PM2.5 pollution in the air, indicating that the brand can achieve effective environmental governance. Mechanism testing shows that city brands can encourage local governments to increase investment in environmental infrastructure, strengthen environmental regulations, and promote public participation in the process of environmental governance. Heterogeneous analysis shows that the larger the city, the stronger the brand’s environmental governance effect, and that the city’s information dissemination ability has a strong support for the city brand’s governance effectiveness. The research results of this article are still robust after undergoing a series of tests, which proves that the conclusions of this article are reliable.
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Received: 10 January 2022
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2022, Vol. 52 
