In the rapid process of urbanisation and industrialisation, the increasingly prominent water environment problem has become a key constraint to sustainable socio-economic development. It has become an urgent need for sustainable development to construct a scientific management strategy based on performance evaluation of water environment management to reduce the pressure on the water environment. Most of the current studies are based on statistical data and spatio-temporal analysis for performance evaluation, neglecting the dynamic interaction between subsystems and the exploration of influencing factors. Taking the urban agglomeration around Taihu Lake as the study area, we constructed a water environment governance performance evaluation system based on the Driving Force-Pressure-State-Impact-Response (DPSIR) model, analyzed the temporal and spatial evolution of water environment governance performance using the Approximate Ideal Solution Sorting Method (TOPSIS) model, used the Tapio decoupling model to reveal the dynamic interactions among the subsystems, and identified key influencing factors of water environment governance with the aid of the obstacle degree model. The key influencing factors of water environment governance were identified with the help of the obstacle degree model. The results show that: (1) the overall water environment governance performance of the city cluster around Taihu Lake shows an upward trend, and the water environment governance performance of each prefecture-level city is ranked as follows: Suzhou > Changzhou > Huzhou > Jiaxing > Wuxi. (2) The city cluster around Taihu Lake mainly shows weak or strong decoupling in P-D and P-R, while P-S&I shows greater instability; the decoupling level of each prefectural city is ranked as: Jiaxing>Huzhou=Wuxi>Changzhou>Suzhou; the performance of water environment governance is not positively correlated with the decoupling level. (3) The main factors affecting water environment governance are government investment, urbanisation level, optimisation and adjustment of industrial structure, input of professional and technical talents, sewage treatment capacity and water production capacity. |