## 7 Conclusions  
The article aims to explore the question how the decisions on the ETP in different phases were made and how to explain the updates of the ETP in China. From the theoretical concept of bounded rationality and the empirical evidence, we conclude that the decisions on the ETP in different phases were made when policy windows were open with the coupling of the problem, politics, and policy streams. That said, the decisions on the ETP were made when two conditions were met: political attention was attracted by the problem and there was a good fit of policy solutions to the problem. During the coupling of the three streams, each decision was made under a specific rationality. As for the updates of ETP, we find that the rationalities of the central governments were limited by the emergent practices during ETP implementation, which gave momentum to the central government to seek new solutions and to revise and adapt the ETP. The theoretical reflection of this article lies in the similarity and the difference of the meaning of bounded rationality in the Western context and in the Chinese context of decentralized authoritarianism. The similarity is that, in both contexts, the decision-makers are goal-oriented, and to achieve the goals the decision-makers do not search for and compare the entire solutions, but adopt a satisfactory solution. The decision-makers are able to learn from past experience and adapt their thoughts to the shape of the problem environment. Therefore, the Chinese decision-makers can be assumed to comply with the principles of intention and adaptation in bounded rationality [8]. However, the difference is that the rationality of the decision-makers in the Western context and in the Chinese context is bounded by different factors. That said, decision-makers face different types of uncertainties. Western scholarscommonly recognize the \"technical\" uncertainties of the problem that limit rationality, including the tractability of the problem, the time available to make the decision (i.e., the more time a decision-maker spends on a problem, the more likely his or her understanding of the problem will appropriate the actual task environment and the limitations of human cognition fades), the information available for problem diagnose, and the accessibility or availability of the solution [1; 7; 8]. The Chinese context featured by decentralized authoritarianism gives more \"political\" uncertainties of the problem that constitute to bounded rationality. The central-local relations of the Chinese governments make the central government less certain of the behavior patterns and responding strategies of local governments. Therefore, the rationality of a decision-maker does not depend solely on one's own cognitive limitations, or the technical aspects of the problem, but also depends on the gaming responses of the interrelated actors involved in the problem. Further, our findings yield important insights as to the environmental governance process in China. For example, we uncovered the major problems and problem dynamics in China's environmental protection. Not only limited to the natural environmental pollution, there are serious managerial problems that inhabit effective implementation of the target policy. Strategic behaviors of local governments emerged and changed from setting low target and issuing an unlimited number of discharge permits, to manipulating statistics data, and to abusing eco-compensation funds. Political attentions of China towards environmental issues are also shifting from cadre evaluation to green GDP, and then from transfer payments to large individual industrial enterprises. The changes in political attention drove environmental policy evolution from total pollution control to energy efficiency, and then from eco-compensation to green, voluntary, and market approaches. The evolving relationship between the different streams captures the tensions in the coupling of solutions and problems over time.