• • Municipal Party secretary concurrently serving as chair of the municipal People’s Congress leads to political power centralization • • The concentration of political power inhibits urban environmental governance. • • Heterogeneity hinges on central inspections, fiscal autonomy, and officials’ age. • • Environmental regulatory stringency and fiscal environmental expenditures serve as the primary mechanisms. Local governments play a crucial role in urban environmental governance, yet the relationship between the power configuration of local officials and environmental performance remains underexplored. Using 2011–2020 panel data for 289 Chinese prefecture-level cities, we examine how power concentration—measured by the municipal Party secretary concurrently serving as chair of the municipal People’s Congress (PCC, proxy for power concentration)—affects urban environmental governance. The results show that the PCC concurrent appointment significantly inhibits urban environmental governance performance, and this finding remains robust to a series of robustness checks. Heterogeneity analyses further indicate that the inhibitory effect is more pronounced in cities without central environmental inspections, those with lower fiscal autonomy, and those with municipal Party secretaries aged under 58. Mechanism analysis reveals that, specifically, the concentration of local political power via PCC weakens the stringency of municipal environmental regulation and leads to a reduction in fiscal environmental expenditures, ultimately constraining improvements in urban environmental governance. This study enriches our understanding of how subnational political power dynamics shape urban environmental governance and provides new institutional insights for optimizing urban environmental governance practices.
Wang et al. (Fri,) studied this question.