There has been debates on whether China's environmental governance is authoritarian, which has raised doubts about whether China's environmental governance can achieve a holistic governance model. To resolve the dispute, a thorough analysis was conducted using content analysis and manual coding of the Hunan Province River Chief System case. Field investigations were conducted from 2019 to 2022, during which 46 in-depth interviews were conducted with government officials involved in RCS. By analysing data from two rural counties and two urban areas, three key mechanisms for achieving holistic governance have been identified:1) cross departmental and cross jurisdictional integration; 2) Extensive information sharing and public participation; 3) two-way collaborative governance driven by goal alignment and accountability measures. This study also identified factors that promote holistic governance: 1) The strength of the CPC plays a key leading role; 2) Coordination and interaction of maintaining political party power, public participation, and bureaucratic accountability; 3)The accountability system embedded in the target system and performance evaluation is a key success factor; 4) Combination of voluntary and coercive tools to achieve governance goals. Research has shown that China adopts a state led environmental governance model. This study enriches the literature on authoritarian environmentalism and holistic governance.

This paper analyses the influences of informal institutions on interorganizational trust. Based on a case study, it identifies five impact paths of informal institutions operating between government and social organizations in China: internal referencing, direct entrustment, office visits, favor provision, and key figure decision-making. Most of these function to maintain relationships and facilitate affection. Trust in these informal institutions is particularistic, exclusive, limited in transferability, discrete, and information based. Accordingly, this paper shows that while informal institutions can foster simple cooperation between a particular government and social organization, they can also strengthen the power imbalance between these two subjects and undermine basic public values.

Major production safety accidents have become the key obstacle to improve the overall safety production level. Analyzing the causal relationship of major production safety accidents is helpful to clarify its characteristics and laws. Based on the literature, the analytical framework of "individual - technology - management - environment" is proposed. Taking 37 production safety accidents as samples, fuzzy set qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA) is used to analyze the occurrence path and mechanism of major production safety accidents. The results show that: (1) Major production safety accidents are the result of multiple factors coupling. Minor external supervision or abnormal production behaviors are more likely to cause major production safety accidents. (2) When the production behavior is abnormal and the safety management ability is insufficient, major production safety accidents are more likely to occur. (3) There are five ways and three mechanisms for major production safety accidents. This work enriches the cognition of causality of production safety accidents from the perspective of configuration, clearly shows which variable combinations lead to major accidents, and helps to prevent and reduce major production safety accidents and their risks.

This study attempts to examine how urban agglomerations establish sustainable environmental collaborative governance. To achieve this goal, the qualitative comparative analysis method is used to explore the conditions and models for urban agglomerations to establish environmental collaborative governance, with 12 urban agglomerations approved by the Chinese authorities as examples. Based on the collaborative governance framework, this paper proposes six starting conditions that affect the establishment of urban agglomeration collaboration: vertical intervention, horizontal cooperation, leadership attention, governance capacity, initial pollution, and economic governance. The interaction of these conditions was tested in the practice of environmental cooperation in urban agglomerations. The results show that horizontal cooperation, leadership attention, and economic governance are necessary conditions for the establishment of urban agglomeration cooperation. The authority-driven mode, capability-driven mode, and pressure-driven mode can promote cooperation. Vertical intervention, governance capacity, and initial pollution constitute the external and internal driving forces of urban agglomeration cooperation. These findings supplement the literature on urban agglomeration collaboration and provide policy makers with insight into sustainable urban agglomeration collaborative environmental governance.