With cities considered the main source of carbon emissions, urban planning could mitigate and help adapt to climate change, given the allocation and regulation of public policies of urban spatial resources. China’s regulatory planning remains the basis for building permission in the original urban and rural planning, and the new territorial spatial planning systems, determining the quality of urban plan implementation. Comprehensive regulatory plans effectively reduce carbon emissions. This study employs Q methodology to compare and analyze urban planners’ and practitioners’ perceptions of China’s regulatory planning in climate change mitigation and adaptation. The findings show that while regulatory planning is key, potential deficiencies include the gaps between regulatory from master plans, capacity shortages of designations and indicators, and unequal rights and responsibilities of local governments. However, mandatory indicators in regulatory planning, especially “greening rate,” “building density,” “land use type,” and “application of renewable energy technologies to the development of municipal infrastructure” could effectively mitigate climate change. “Greening rate” is the core indicator in regulatory planning since it provides empirical evidence for the “green space effect”. This study indicates that local customization of combined regulation of greening rate and green spaces could help mitigate and help China adapt to climate change.

The high-quality and sustainable development of the digital economy cannot be achieved without the support of the policy system. The purpose of this article is to scientifically analyze the laws and characteristics of the policy system that supports the sustainability of the digital economy. Specifically, based on public policy theory, this article constructs an analytical framework of “policy objectives—policy tools—organizational management” and incorporates the “central-local” relationship with Chinese characteristics into the framework. Meanwhile, text analysis was used to quantitatively analyze 971 digital economy policies issued by the central and local governments in China from 2000 to 2022. Research shows that the central government of China has taken the lead in introducing digital economy policies, and local governments are able to respond quickly. The central government’s digital economy policy goals fluctuate and change, while local governments pay more stable attention to the digital product service industry. Both central and local governments widely use supply oriented policy tools and environmental-oriented policy tools, while demand-oriented policy tools are not widely applied. The vertical relationship between central and local data management agencies is still unclear, and the degree of cross departmental and cross regional cooperation is not high. Meanwhile, empirical analysis based on the two-way fixed effects model shows that technological innovation, R&D funding, and industrial structure have a significant impact on changes in digital economy policies. This article summarizes the characteristics of the evolution of digital economy policies in the Chinese context, providing policy design references for promoting the sustainability of the digital economy and methodological insights for policy research in other fields.