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With the deterioration of the environment across the globe, environmental problems have attracted much attention from the public, academia, and governments. This study contributes to the understanding of environmental policy implementation by empirically testing the policy feedback theory and official ranking tournament theory in the Chinese context. In particular, it focuses on how prior environmental performance ranking transitions into future policy performance through the mandatory target system (MTS) in China. The results from this study show that provincial environmental performance ranking serves as an effective incentive for strengthening environmental governance. Low‐ranking provinces will improve their environmental policy performances in future years because of competition in the official tournament. Policy implications are drawn to improve the administrative design of environmental management. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The institutional landscape for public land management in the U.S. West underwent a seismic shift in the 1990s as the long-dominant resource extraction paradigm was replaced by the ecosystem management paradigm. Here we analyze the efforts of community-based organizations (CBOs), entities that emerged in some locations across the West to help their respective communities navigate the transition from resource extraction to environmental stewardship. Despite their formal status as civil society actors, in practice CBOs came to fill various institutional gaps by taking on roles traditionally assigned to both the state and the private sector. We use a case study approach to examine how the Hayfork, California-based Watershed Research and Training Center engages in institutional work within a setting that is at once both open and constrained, as the rural community within which it operates lacks strong state- or industry-led development trajectories while remaining constrained by the legacies of past institutions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines how overlap between trade and environmental issues are managed under the North American Free Trade Agreement, and specifically the role that the Commission for Environmental Cooperation ( CEC) Secretariat plays in this process. We demonstrate how the CEC Secretariat has influenced trade-environment politics, primarily through knowledge brokering in ways that build state capacity to collaborate across borders on trade-environment issues. Specifically, we demonstrate how the Secretariat has influenced decisions related to budget allocations, cooperative activities between member states, the creation of new institutions, and evaluating allegations of parties' failures to enforce environmental laws. Moreover, we argue that this case raises important questions concerning the appropriate role of secretariats in international politics and has important policy implications with several new secretariats currently being set up under the burgeoning number of regional trade agreements under negotiation by the United States and many others. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]