China has witnessed a road for effective environmental governance, providing a great opportunity for understanding the Chinese institutional advantage. Based on the Central Environmental Inspection(CEI), this paper adopted an institutional complementarity perspective to explore how China is getting its institutions right in environmental governance. Results show that the design and implementation of CEI can compensate the disadvantage of laws and other institutions, and the CEI mechanism itself exhibits internal complementarity, that is, structural complementarity between politics and rule of law, functional coupling between party regulation, policy and the law, combination between vertical inspection and comprehensive supervision, and the healthy interaction between party and the state, the government and society. The formation mechanisms of institutional complementarity include the construction of history and context, changing beliefs of the party, state-level institutional experiments and learning-by-doing mechanisms.The conclusion implies that China can not only achieve economic success by hierarchical local experiments, but also manage to solve environmental problems by institutional experiments led by the state.

新时代中国在质疑声中走出一条有效的环境治理之路,为理解中国国家治理制度优势提供了一个绝佳的机会。本文采取制度互补的理论视角,以生态环境保护督察制度为切入点,考查中国在环境治理上是如何 “把制度搞对”的。研究发现,生态环境保护督察制度的设计与执行能够很好地补足现行法律等其他制度的缺陷,而且制度自身具备内在的互补性,呈现出政治与法治的结构性互补,党内法规、党的政策与国家法律之间的治理功能耦合,纵向督察机制与全面监督机制相结合以及党和国家、政府与社会之间的良性互动的特征。制度互补性的生成有赖于历史与现实的塑造、执政党观念的变迁、国家层面的制度试验与 “干中学”等机制。本研究结论表明,中国的制度优势在于既能通过分散式政策试验实现经济治理的成功,也可以通过国家层面的制度试验解决环境保护问题。