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The issue of environmental governance has received considerable attention. While extensive research focuses on the relationship between economic growth and environmental protection, this paper provides a different perspective by exploring the mechanisms affecting the relationship between land-based revenue and environmental performance. Based on the regression analyses of province-level data during 2000-2018 in China, the results show that: (1) land-based finance has a significantly positive impact on air pollution; (2) both central government policies and local residents' concerns incentivize local governments to improve environmental quality through land revenue; (3) regional differences exist regarding the impact of these two factors, probably due to various development stages and financial conditions; (4) local governments tend to increase expenditure on environmental protection by taking residents' concerns into consideration. This research contributes to understanding the driving forces behind the relationship between land finance and environmental performance, and it extends our knowledge of local governments' decision-making processes to accomplish multiple tasks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The minimum land price (MLP) regulation that China introduced in 2007 provides a quasi-experiment to investigate how government intervention in the land market influences the intensity with which industrial land is used, which has received limited attention in existing literature. Using a difference-in-difference strategy, our estimates show that an exogenous increase in the price of industrial land induced by the MLP regulation's introduction significantly increased industrial land-use intensity by putting more capital on same amount of land. The findings from this paper therefore suggest that MLP regulation as an incentive-based policy instrument is effective for promoting land-use intensity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

One way to support active mobility is by the successful articulation and diffusion of new bike-infrastructure concepts. This paper studies the journey of one such concept in the Netherlands, namely the cycle highway, which nowadays is often referred to as a 'fast cycleway'. These routes provide high-quality and spacious cycling facilities connecting (sub)urban residential sites to nodes of work and study. They are built with the aim to induce a substantive modal shift in regional commuting from car and transit to cycling. Currently, there are nearly 300 fast cycleway initiatives in the Netherlands of which 52 have already been constructed. Based on 27 interviews with planners, engineers and lobbyists, this paper traces the success of the fast cyclepath concept through the perspectives of "articulation" and "liquidity". We find that fast cycleroutes emerge as whole, coherent entities through six separate vocabularies, namely of demonstration, quality framing, policy rule and contract, planning diplomacy, financial wizardry and design negotiation. Each vocabulary gives rise to a "global form" fuelling the "currency" and performativity of the fast cycleroute concept. Different contexts also induce considerable differentiation, raising the question how far the concept may be stretched. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]