Since the 1980s, China has been accelerating the country’s rate of industrialization. Industrial production leads to a large number of pollution discharges, of which water pollution is an important cause of a variety of diseases (Lin et al., 2000; Ebenstein, 2012). Among the various water pollutants, COD (chemical oxygen demand) is the most representative one. If the COD content in industrial wastewater is high, produced toxins may not only harm aquatic organisms, but can also affect human health through the food chain. The high levels of COD discharges have also attracted considerable attention from governments at all levels. Unsurprisingly, COD regulation was incorporated into China’s long-term national development plan. Figure 1 shows the total amount of COD discharges from China’s industrial sector in the first decade of this century. As can be seen, the total amount of COD discharges from the industrial sector declined as a whole from 2000 to 2010. However, the downward trend from 2003 onwards was slight. The average annual decline was 4.94% during this research period. In contrast, COD discharge intensity experienced a sharp decline in varying degrees every year. The average annual decline during the research period was 29.45%. This shows that, with the gradual growth of the output value of China’s industrial sector, the COD discharge and output growth have been decoupled; COD treatment has also achieved satisfactory results.
China’s environmental regulation depends to a large extent on local governments and officials’ governance capabilities. The central government has entrusted the environmental governance tasks to local governments. The tasks are then completed by local officials, who implement specific goals. With the appraisal pressure and promotion motivation faced by local officials, these environmental governance tasks can be achieved as expected. Existing studies (e.g., Kahn et al., 2015; Wang and Lei, 2021) also suggest that local officials in China have started to shift from GDP competition to environmental indicator competition as early as the beginning of this century. Then, as local governments spare no effort to intervene in the production activities of industrial enterprises and achieve their pollution reduction targets, the personal environmental governance capabilities of local officials will play an increasingly key role.
Existing experience transfer theory (Budden and Phil, 1942) suggests that prior experience can help individuals to learn and enhance their abilities. Both Schmidt et al. (1986) and Dokko et al. (2009) further provide the necessary conditions for experience transfer theory, suggesting that previous experiences should be highly correlated with current job requirements. Existing research has provided a sufficient explanation for the mechanisms of prior experience, emphasizing the important role of management beliefs and judgments in identifying and capturing new strategic opportunities and optimizing resource allocation (Augier and Teece, 2009; Chadwick and Dabu, 2009). However, the above pieces of evidence are collected from the fields of corporate management. For environmental protection, the actual impact of the leaders’ previous environmental protection experience still needs further research.
Notably, the environmental governance capability of local government officials is likely caused by the “learning-by-doing” effect, an effect that has made the endogenous economic growth theory shine. However, the “learning-by-doing” effect is not only reflected in the workers employed by industrial enterprises, but may also be reflected in the governance ability of local government officials. After local officials serve in an environmental protection department, their environmental governance ability will be tempered and cultivated, to a certain extent. In particular, for the prefecture-level Communist Party secretaries, who are the key officials of the local government with the highest governance rights, their environmental governance capacity needs to be the focus of special attention. After officials with environmental protection experience take office as prefecture-level Communist Party secretaries, the environmental governance work in the regions under their jurisdiction may be paid special attention, and certain environmental policies will be introduced and strengthened. This is conducive to the smooth implementation of COD discharge reduction. In addition, the environmental governance capability improved through the accumulation of previous experience may also be more conducive to pollution control. However, whether or not the previous environmental protection experience of prefecture-level Communist Party secretaries really works still needs to be subjected to the necessary empirical tests.
This study contributes to enriching research regarding local official’s regulatory capacity at the micro level. Existing studies highlight the factors in determining the leadership, such as social network ties (Mehra et al., 2006), inspirational style (Joshi et al., 2009), risk perceptions (Zhang et al., 2020), and gender (Abraham and Burbano, 2022). Based on the experience transfer theory in psychology and extensive empirical analyses, this study analyzes the primary determinant in the formation of environmental regulation capacity, namely the previous work experience in local environmental protection departments.
This study also extends the current literature by revealing the reasons the COD discharges of Chinese industrial enterprises have been successfully reduced. Existing studies (e.g., Fan et al., 2019) have pointed out that COD reduction targets have made substantial contributions to reducing COD discharges. Although these pollution reduction targets have created certain pressure (and also provided motivation) for local government officials, the mechanisms through which local government officials can effectively achieve COD reduction are incomplete. This is because, even if local governments have the motivation to reduce COD discharges, insufficient environmental governance capacity means they are still unable to achieve the established COD reduction targets. In other words, existing studies ignored the important role played by the personal environmental governance capabilities of officials in the process of pollution regulation. These environmental governance capabilities may have been developed through the “learning-by-doing” effect of local government officials, that is, through previous environmental protection experience. Therefore, this study analyzes the relevant officials’ actual contribution to COD reduction from the perspective of their previous environmental protection experience. This study not only investigates the average COD reduction effect, but also analyzes the year-by-year impact, in order to judge the difference between short-term and long-term effects.
A series of robustness tests are provided to ensure the credibility of research conclusions. First, the benchmark model presents certain DID strategy characters. A parallel trend analysis is conducted to examine whether a secretary with environmental protection experience would have an impact on the COD discharge intensity in this region before the inauguration. Second, sensitivity tests regarding different winsorized ratios (which are employed to clean the raw data) are conducted. Third, the interference of city administrative levels (reflecting the administrative level of the secretaries) on the COD discharge intensity is eliminated. Finally, the duration of the environmental protection experience of these secretaries in the early stage of career is selected as an instrumental variable (IV), and the endogeneity is addressed, in order to obtain credible research conclusions.
Previous environmental protection experience may present heterogeneous effects on COD reduction in many aspects. First of all, the role played by the secretaries’ previous environmental protection experience may vary, depending on the degree of regulation imposed by the central government. Therefore, this study investigates the heterogeneous effects of the secretaries’ previous environmental protection experience on COD reduction, both before and after the mandatory COD reduction targets introduced by the central government. Secondly, the COD discharge density of different sub-sectors varies greatly; the COD discharges of highly-polluting sub-sectors are bound to attract more attention from the relevant government departments. Therefore, according to the COD discharge density, this study also divides China’s industrial sector into dirty (i.e., highly-polluting) sub-sectors and clean sub-sectors. Then, the differences in the COD reduction effect caused by the secretaries’ previous environmental protection experience are investigated in the sectoral dimension.
Finally, this study makes a tentative exploration of the influential mechanism. Specifically, based on the basic fact that the changes of COD discharge intensity are determined by the two indicators of total COD discharges and the polluting enterprises’ total output, and that the total COD discharges can be divided into production and discharge stages, this study examines the influential mechanism. In the production stage, the impact on clean production technology is examined, in order to observe the changes in the amount of enterprises’ produced COD that has been caused by previous environmental protection experience in the production process. Additionally, in the COD discharge stage, this study discusses the impacts of secretaries’ previous environmental protection experience on the sewage charge and the treatment capacity of environmental facilities. This is done to judge the effectiveness of the key role of punishment and deterrence in reducing the relevant enterprises’ COD discharge intensity.
In this study, the data of Chinese industrial enterprises are used to test the impact of secretaries’ previous environmental protection experience on COD reduction. However, the conclusions of this study can also provide a decision-making reference for environmental governance and official appointments in many developing countries, and even in developed countries. For industrialized and developing countries, it is especially worth learning how to select officials with environmental protection experience to take charge of local development and to increase the environmental protection capacity of reserve cadres in non-environmental departments.
The remainder of this study is organized as follows: Section 2 provides a literature review and mechanism analysis. Section 3 reports the empirical design, including the research methods and data used. Section 4 discusses the benchmark results. Section 5 provides the heterogeneity analysis, from the perspectives of the COD regulation policy of the central government, the duration of previous environmental protection experience, and the sectoral pollution density. Section 6 analyzes the impact mechanism from the perspectives of production and discharge stages, and Section 7 presents study’s conclusion and policy implications.