Walking the Talk: Bureaucratic Reputation, Vertical Management Reform and the Recoupling of Environmental Governance in China
Description
Decoupling denotes organizational maintenance of symbolic compliance with institutional rules without substantive action. A pervasive challenge in public sector governance, decoupling has attracted considerable scholarly attention to its antecedents; yet existing research offers limited systematic explanation of how decoupling can be undone. Drawing on bureaucratic reputation theory, this study conceptualizes claim-action decoupling as a strategic reputation management behavior. Under conditions of cost asymmetry between moral reputation (how much we care) and performative reputation (whether outcomes actually improve), local governments prioritize low-cost discursive claims to construct moral reputation as a substitute for high-cost substantive actions required to build performative reputation, engendering a decoupling equilibrium. Reputational arbiters, however, can achieve recoupling by altering the relative costs across reputation dimensions, thereby realigning discursive claims with substantive action. Situated in the context of China’s environmental vertical management reform (EVMR) and drawing on government work reports (GWRs) and air quality data from 285 prefectural-level cities, we find that the embeddedness of reputational arbiters compels local governments to shift from a “high moral, low performative” reputation management strategy toward the alignment of these two reputation dimensions, thereby achieving recoupling. In the short term, governments prioritize defensive discursive retrenchment; substantive environmental quality improvements materialize only over a longer time horizon. Moreover, the efficacy of reputational arbiters is bounded by claim type, public attention, economic pressure, and mayoral characteristics. This study advances decoupling scholarship from a theory of persistence to a theory of change, offering novel theoretical insights and governance experience for understanding the micro-mechanisms of public sector reputation management and addressing the dilemma of government greenwashing.