Governance reform, external support, and environmental regulation enforcement in rural China: The case of Guangdong province

Environmental Reviews and Case Studies: Limitations and Challenges of Provincial Environmental Protection Bureaus in China's Environmental Data Monitoring, Reporting and Verification

“…Contrary to previous literature~Ge et al Kostka and Hobbs, 2010;Mol and Carter, 2006;Tang et al, 2010! that emphasizes the flexibility and relative autonomy of provincial and local EPBs in implementing environmental policies as a central-government strategy, officials interviewed in this study demonstrate that in practice provincial and local EPBs are still very much tied to the center.…”

“…as a primary aim of the new leadership~Xinhua News Agency, 2012b!. However, prioritization of economic development has meant that environmental performance by local governments and industries has lagged~Beyer, 2006; Lieberthal, 1997;Mol and Carter, 2006;OECD, 2007;Ran, 2013;Tang, Lo, and Fryxell, 2010;Xu, 2011!. To address competing incentives for environmental and economic achievements, the 12th Five-Year Plan for National Economic and Social Development, the policy blueprint outlining key economic and social development targets between 2011 and 2015, includes the greatest number of binding energy, climate, and pollution-reduction targets while simultaneously downplaying economic goals as "aspirational," rather than binding~Seligsohn and Hsu, 2011!. Provincial and local~meaning primarily the sub-levels of municipal and county governments! cadres are then evaluated based on their ability to achieve these environmental targets, although the cadre performance evaluation system based on statistics and indicators has also revealed problems of data and information abnormalities, falsification, and collusion between local officials to hide or misrepreIn terms of providing data for the purposes of environmental performance evaluation, few studies have considered sub-national institutions in place for data collection, reporting, and verification in China.…”

Stakeholder demands and corporate environmental coping strategies in China

“…With growing threats of environmental degradation, controlling industrial pollution has been an urgent regulatory task in China (Liu et al, 2015;Tang et al, 2010;Zhong and Mol, 2008). Yet many polluting enterprises are still at the threshold of minimum compliance or even non-compliance (Van Rooij, 2006).…”

Going green or going away: Environmental regulation, economic geography and firms’ strategies in China’s pollution-intensive industries

“…Pollution emissions vary across the Chinese regions as the coastal regions have a relatively longer period of unbridled economic development (Tang et al, 2010) (Fig. 1), and the strength of the enforcement of the environmental regulations varies across regions as well (Zhang and Fu, 2008).…”