Assessing the role of public, media, and government attention on air pollution governance in China

Attention from social subjects, such as the government, public, and media, serves as a vital diver for urban environmental improvement. While most empirical studies about environmental attention have discussed only one or two of these subjects so far, the literature overlooks the potential collective influence. Drawing on the concept of attention and stakeholder theory, this paper integrates government, public, and media into a unified framework. Utilizing data from Chinese prefecture-level cities spanning from 2012 to 2020, this paper reveals how multi-subject attention influences air quality, including its spatial spillover effects and specific mechanisms. This study finds that 1) multi-subject attention could effectively inhibit air pollution, the direct effects of government, public, and media attention are -7.278, -0.077, and -0.502, respectively. 2) Only the public and media attention have significant cross-city suppressing effects on air pollution. Specifically, the spillover effects of the public and media attention's proxy variables are -4.003 and -1.850. 3) Overall, multi-subject attention can effectively reduce air pollution by establishing environmental laws and regulations, strengthening environmental enforcement, and increasing environmental protection investment. However, there are significant differences in the ways government, public, and media attention improve air quality in local and surrounding cities through these three mechanisms.