伴随政府治理模式从管制向服务转变，承诺机制被广泛应用于政府治理实践。政府承诺能够通过对未来治理方向的可信预告减少政府机会主义行动、稳定治理对象预期，从而引导相关主体主动顺应发展方向，促成治理良性循环。但是，政府承诺具有在超越法定职责之外主动承担一定失信风险的自我加压特性，新承诺的作出并非轻易为之，往往牵涉政府治理的重大转向与资源分配的重要调整。已有研究缺乏对政府承诺诞生机理的深入探讨，无法为承诺决策相关的政府治理逻辑提供有效解释。基于此，本研究以21世纪后地方政府新作出的环境治理承诺为例，提出研究问题：中国地方政府环境治理承诺为何以及如何诞生？为回答该问题，本研究基于文献分析和访谈了解为政府承诺诞生构建“压力-注意力-承诺”的一般性分析框架，并在该框架指导下具体围绕两个子问题展开分析：（1）中央环境目标责任制改革是否以及如何提升地方政府的环境注意力？（2）地方政府环境注意力是否以及如何影响环境治理承诺的诞生及后续设定？作者通过申请信息公开构建覆盖323个地级行政单位2001-2015年的政府工作报告文本库，用于结合自然语言处理和机器学习测度环境注意力；手工整理各地政府工作报告公布的年度环境治理目标数据，用于测度环境治理承诺；同时在对政府官员和相关专家深度访谈的基础上，结合地区特征、官员特征、地方日报新闻、地方法规出台等数据，运用断点回归设计、事件史分析、Heckman两阶段模型、调节效应模型、工具变量法等计量方法进行实证检验。本研究发现，环境目标责任制改革显著促使地方政府提升环境注意力进而作出环境治理承诺，但在此过程中地方政府可能发生受领导人特质调节的注意力响应偏差和受财政能力调节的承诺提出策略：第一，特定领导人特质能够规避由当地政治经济特征引致的注意力响应偏差。注意力响应随政治竞争强度变化呈显著倒U型波动，但市长高学历时该倒U型波动不再发生；大企业势力显著阻碍环境注意力响应，但市长不具有企业工作经历时该阻碍影响不再显著成立。第二，承诺提出策略具有随发展阶段变化的趋势规律。随着财政能力增强，注意力对承诺提出的影响逐渐减弱，承诺提出策略从积极趋于审慎。本研究的贡献在于：（1）基于地方环境治理情境探讨了政府承诺的诞生机理；（2）通过将领导人特质纳入地方响应分析增进了对委托代理的理解；（3）运用财政能力异质性发现揭示了差异化的承诺提出策略。本文可以为减少地方治理偏差和优化地方治理体系提供一定政策启示

Along with the transformation of the government governance model from control to service, the commitment mechanism has been widely used in the practice of government governance. Government commitments can reduce government opportunistic actions and stabilize the expectations of governance targets through credible advance notice of future governance direction, thus guiding the relevant subjects to take the initiative to comply with the direction of development and contributing to a virtuous circle of governance. However, government commitments have the self-pressurizing characteristic of taking the risk of breach of trust beyond the statutory duties, and the making of new commitments is not easy, but often involves a major shift in government governance and an important adjustment in resource allocation. Existing research lacks an in-depth exploration of the rationale of government commitment, and cannot provide an effective explanation for the logic of government governance related to commitment decision-making. Based on this, this study takes the new environmental governance commitments made by local governments after the 21st century as an example, and poses the research question: why and how do local governments‘ environmental governance commitments arise in China?To answer this question, this study builds a general analytical framework of "Pressure-Attention-Commitment" for the rationale of government commitment based on literature analysis and interviews, and analyzes two sub-questions under the guidance of this framework: (1) Does and how does the reform of the environmental target responsibility system enhance the environmental attention of local governments? (2) Does and how does local governments‘ environmental attention affect the first and subsequent setting of environmental governance commitments? The authors construct a text database of government work reports covering 323 prefecture-level administrative units from 2001 to 2015 by applying for information disclosure, which is used to measure environmental attention by combining natural language processing and machine learning; manually organize the annual environmental governance target data published in the government work reports of various cities, which is used to measure environmental governance commitments; and at the same time, on the basis of in-depth interviews with government officials and relevant experts, combined with data on regional characteristics, officials‘ characteristics, news in local daily newspapers, and the introduction of local regulations, empirical tests were conducted by using methods such as regression discontinuity design, event history analysis, Heckman two-stage model, moderated effects model, and instrumental variables method.This study finds that the reform of the environmental target responsibility system significantly promotes local governments to increase their environmental attention and make commitments to environmental governance, but in this process, local governments may experience attentional response bias moderated by leader traits and commitments moderated by fiscal capacity. Attentional responses fluctuate significantly with the intensity of political competition in an inverted U-shape, but this inverted U-shape no longer occurs when the mayor has a high level of education, and the large-firm dominance significantly hinders environmental attentional responses, but this hindrance no longer holds when the mayor does not have corporate work experience. Second, the commitment making strategy has a trend pattern that varies with the stage of development. As fiscal capacity increases, the effect of attention on commitment making diminishes, and commitment making strategies tend to change from positive to prudent. The contributions of this study are (1) exploring the rationale and mechanism of government commitment based on the local environmental governance context; (2) improving the understanding of principal-agent by incorporating leader traits into the local response analysis; and (3) applying the finding of fiscal capacity heterogeneity to reveal differentiated commitment making strategies. This paper can provide some policy insights for reducing local governance bias and optimizing local governance systems.