The nexus of central-local environmental policy making: The impact of central environmental inspection on local community governance.

Understanding how intergovernmental competition shapes local environmental regulation under top-down supervision is critical for optimizing environmental governance systems. This study addresses the research gap in dynamic strategic behaviors of local governments during central environmental inspections (CEI) by constructing a two-stage decision-making model that integrates environmental regulation competition and economic resource competition. We validate the model through equilibrium solution reasoning, numerical simulations, and a case study of twin cities, exploring the conditional effects of intergovernmental competition on local environmental policy implementation. The results show that under simultaneous CEI, central supervision significantly improves local environmental performance, while its impact on economic outcomes is contingent on penalty intensity. Incentive compatibility between CEI and the local official promotion mechanism is only achieved when interregional economic competition is moderate and interdepartmental coordination is high. Under sequential CEI, moderate competition and high coordination drive first-mover governments to adopt a race-to-the-top strategy, whereas second-movers engage in race-to-the-bottom behavior. A decline in coordination weakens first-mover enthusiasm and generates late-mover advantages, while minimal coordination under high accountability pressure reverses this strategic pattern. In high-competition scenarios, high coordination preserves first-mover advantages-an effect that strengthens as competition moderates-while severe coordination failure enables second-movers to achieve strategic overtaking. These findings clarify the conditional dynamics of local environmental governance under China's CEI system and provide actionable insights for designing context-specific incentive mechanisms to balance environmental protection and economic development.