Engineering mayors and urban carbon governance: evidence from China

IF 5.8 3区环境科学与生态学 Q2 ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCES

Carbon Balance and Management Pub Date : 2025-10-24 DOI:10.1186/s13021-025-00327-y

Lyubing Feng, Shirong Zeng, Sai Wang

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引用次数: 0

Abstract

Under China’s “dual carbon” goals, local officials bear primary responsibility for reducing carbon emissions within their jurisdictions. This paper investigates whether mayors’ professional backgrounds are associated with better performance in achieving emission reduction outcomes. Using Panel data from prefecture-level cities between 2005 and 2016, we find that mayors with engineering backgrounds significantly reduce carbon emission intensity. This effect is pronounced in in megacities, industrial hubs, eastern regions, and cities with stronger economic foundations. Mechanism analysis reveals: engineering-trained mayors possess stronger technical expertise and systematic, pragmatic thinking, enabling them to foster greater local green innovation—both in quantity and quality—and to adopt high-intensity low-carbon policies, particularly market-based instruments. These findings highlight that appropriately appointing mayors with engineering expertise represents a distinctive and effective policy instrument for achieving China’s dual-carbon goals. This also underscores the importance of incorporating technical expertise into cadre selection and evaluation systems.

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工程市长与城市碳治理：来自中国的证据

在中国的“双碳”目标下，地方官员在其管辖范围内承担减少碳排放的主要责任。本文研究了市长的专业背景是否与更好的减排绩效相关。利用2005 - 2016年地级市的面板数据，我们发现具有工程背景的市长显著降低了碳排放强度。这种影响在特大城市、工业中心、东部地区和经济基础较强的城市表现明显。机制分析表明：受过工程培训的市长拥有更强的技术专长和系统、务实的思维，使他们能够在数量和质量上促进更多的本地绿色创新，并采取高强度的低碳政策，特别是基于市场的工具。这些发现强调，适当任命具有工程专业知识的市长是实现中国双碳目标的一种独特而有效的政策工具。这也强调了将技术专长纳入干部选拔和评价体系的重要性。

本文章由计算机程序翻译，如有差异，请以英文原文为准。

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来源期刊

Carbon Balance and Management Environmental Science-Management, Monitoring, Policy and Law

CiteScore

7.60

自引率

0.00%

发文量

审稿时长

14 weeks

期刊介绍： Carbon Balance and Management is an open access, peer-reviewed online journal that encompasses all aspects of research aimed at developing a comprehensive policy relevant to the understanding of the global carbon cycle. The global carbon cycle involves important couplings between climate, atmospheric CO2 and the terrestrial and oceanic biospheres. The current transformation of the carbon cycle due to changes in climate and atmospheric composition is widely recognized as potentially dangerous for the biosphere and for the well-being of humankind, and therefore monitoring, understanding and predicting the evolution of the carbon cycle in the context of the whole biosphere (both terrestrial and marine) is a challenge to the scientific community. This demands interdisciplinary research and new approaches for studying geographical and temporal distributions of carbon pools and fluxes, control and feedback mechanisms of the carbon-climate system, points of intervention and windows of opportunity for managing the carbon-climate-human system. Carbon Balance and Management is a medium for researchers in the field to convey the results of their research across disciplinary boundaries. Through this dissemination of research, the journal aims to support the work of the Intergovernmental Panel for Climate Change (IPCC) and to provide governmental and non-governmental organizations with instantaneous access to continually emerging knowledge, including paradigm shifts and consensual views.