Effective Regulations with Little Effect? The Antecedents of the Perceptions of Environmental Officials on Enforcement Effectiveness in China

Abstract

Enforcement gaps are an especially vexing problem in China due to pervasive "pro-growth" local government priorities, the weak administrative capacity of environmental agencies themselves, and relatively weak levels of societal support for a cleaner environment. This study seeks to examine this problem from the perspective of the local enforcement officials by empirically examining the relationships between these and other influences on their perceptions of enforcement effectiveness. Using samples of enforcement officials from the fast-growing cities of Chengdu, Dalian, and Guangzhou, this study finds that many of the more commonly cited problems related to regulatory enforcement were not as influential in accounting for variations in perceptions of enforcement effectiveness than the current literature might suggest. Moreover, this study also finds that the pattern of influences varies greatly across jurisdictions, with only the officials' belief in the legitimacy of the governments' policies being significant in all three samples. Strong influences on perceptions of enforcement effectiveness in two of the three samples include the environmental values of enforcement officials, their perceptions of organizational capacity for enforcement, and their assessment of government support for environmental protection. Although government support was found to be a strong predictor of enforcement effectiveness in two of the three samples, the influence of societal support had a somewhat mixed and more complicated effect. In addition, this study suggests that further improvements in enforcement effectiveness may be possible by cultivating or selecting enforcement officials with strong environmental values and beliefs in the legitimacy of the government's environmental policy to take charge of enforcement. Because it is generally accepted that local environmental protection bureaus are generally upgrading their organizational capacity for improvement as the result of increasing central government support for environmental protection and institutional restructuring, and because environmental awareness in China is growing, this study suggests that some incremental progress is likely in China's efforts to close the enforcement gap. Unfortunately, such improvements are likely to be masked by the steep trajectory of economic growth, the narrow scope of regulatory control (i.e., with scant attention paid to nonindustrial sources), and the migration of industrial pollution to rural areas.

Diffusion of selected green supply chain management practices: an assessment of Chinese enterprises

“…Fryxell et al 2004, Zhu et al 2005, Lo et al 2006. With relatively weak awareness of environmental protection in China, most enterprises implement GSCM because of external competitive pressures of the supply chain.…”

FEATURE: Environmental Problems and Challenges in China

“…The most difficult challenge, however, may be to find effective approaches in regulating the behaviors and relationships of the various stakeholders (e.g., different levels of government, the industrial sector, and the public), who often have different, sometimes conflicting, objectives and expectations. Capacity building therefore should be enhanced in fields such as basic scientific research, technological innovation, policy and institutional design, environmental legislation, and enforcement (12,23,26,42,43).…”

Institutional stakeholder perceptions of barriers to Green IT policy in Nigeria

“…This is not uncommon in the context of developing nations, which tend to prioritize economic development over the environmental sustainability agenda (Desai 1998;Gray 2003;Lo et al 2006;OECD 2012). The OECD (2012) report on green growth and developing countries, in particular, exposes a continuing situation where developing countries are slower in enforcing environmental policies as 'policy ideas and technologies are neither easily accessible nor entirely relevant to their national developmental needs'.…”

“…insufficient governmental incentives to promote sustainable IT behaviours in organizations), which are inimical to effective environmental regulation. This scenario substantiates the idea that effective regulation requires the commitment of continuing streams of funding, but in developing countries, 'unfortunately, sufficient resources are seldom allocated to the enforcement of environmental regulations' (Lo et al 2006). …”