Toward an effective policy mix for domestic waste management in China: Interdepartmental cooperation as an enabler

The approach of combining diverse policy instruments is increasingly being applied to address complex environmental and sustainability issues. For such an approach of policy mix to be effective, broader contextual and process factors must be taken into account. In this paper, we identify interdepartmental cooperation within the government as a condition for an effective policy mix, especially for China. Taking domestic waste governance as a case study, we collect policy document data from 32 cities across China in the last decade and verify the influential mechanism between the interdepartmental cooperation network and the policy mix through quantitative methods of social network analysis and regression. The empirical results show that the Chinese government has intensified interdepartmental cooperation over the past decade in the area of domestic waste governance, which has facilitated the increased adoption of policy mixes. In addition, a shift in the policy strategy and policy direction of the Chinese government for domestic waste governance can be traced from the changes in the specific departments involved in the cooperation network.