Wencheng Fan

Place-based environmental management is increasingly used to align local development with ecological conservation, yet its effectiveness in improving biodiversity outcomes remains insufficiently understood. This study evaluates whether China’s Ecological Civilization Demonstration Zone (ECDZ) policy enhances avian biodiversity at the county level. Unlike single-instrument environmental regulations, the ECDZ policy integrates environmental regulation, ecological restoration, industrial restructuring, public participation, and local government performance assessment into a unified governance framework. Using approximately 1.2 million bird observation records from the China Birdwatching Records Center during 2011-2022, we construct county-level indicators of bird species richness and abundance and estimate policy effects using a staggered difference-in-differences design.The results show that ECDZ designation significantly increases both bird species richness and bird abundance. These effects remain robust after a series of checks, including alternative estimators for staggered treatment timing, instrumental variable estimation, and sample restrictions based on breeding-season observations. Heterogeneity analyses indicate that biodiversity gains are stronger in midwestern counties, larger counties, and among migratory bird species. Mechanism analysis suggests that the policy improves avian biodiversity through strengthened local environmental regulation, the exit of pollution-intensive firms, and greater public environmental concern. We further document positive spatial spillovers to neighboring and economically connected counties, although these spillover effects decline with geographical distance and weaker economic linkages.These findings demonstrate that place-based ecological governance can generate measurable biodiversity benefits when environmental objectives are embedded into local development and administrative evaluation systems. However, the weakening of effects over time highlights the need for sustained monitoring, adaptive management, and cross-jurisdictional coordination in biodiversity-oriented environmental policy design.