Abstract: Faced with the worsening environmental problems, the central government has timely implemented the central environmental protection inspection. Different scholars get nearly contrary conclusions after their researches from different perspectives. From the perspective of state governance, this paper studies the operation logic of the central environment protection supervision, collets the sample data of the pilot inspection and the first batch of environmental protection supervisions, and conducts an empirical analysis by using the methods of difference-in-difference and breakpoint regression. The findings show that the central environmental protection inspection has achieved remarkable effects; however, the persistence of the effect is rather weaker. This is the inevitable result of the high operation costs and high operation efficiency of the central environmental protection inspection, its policy experience cannot be simply affirmed or denied. The central environmental protection supervision is a kind of “governance” to the conventional environmental governance mechanism itself, an important tool to balance the strong incentives in the economic field and the weak incentives in the environmental field, and an important means of national governance. At the meantime, we should recognize the limitation of its high costs, start to improve the ecological environment liability system, encourage innovation and optimize the industrial structure gradually, so as to fundamentally improve the quality of the ecological environment.

Key words: state governance, central environmental protection inspection, campaign-style environment governance, conventional environmental governance