Political Commitment, Policy Ambiguity, and Corporate Environmental Practices

Abstract

A lack of clear political commitment together with confusing rules and enforcement often characterize the institutional context of policy implementation and regulatory compliance in developing countries. By connecting such contextual features to existing models of policy implementation and regulatory compliance, we examine how regulatory factors are related to basic and proactive corporate environmental management practices in the Pearl River Delta region in China. Drawing on data derived from both a survey and in-depth interviews, we show that a perception of clear political commitment to environmental protection across multiple government levels and units is positively associated with business efforts in basic environmental practices, regardless of the specific enforcement intensity. Nevertheless, a perception of clear political commitment is not related to proactive environmental practices. Conversely, a perception of policy ambiguity, in the form of confusing regulatory standards and enforcement, is negatively associated with corporate efforts in both basic and proactive environmental practices; yet, intensive inspections mitigate these negative associations with policy ambiguity.

Examining the wider context of formal youth mentoring programme development, delivery and maintenance: A qualitative study with mentoring managers and experts in the United Kingdom

“…Moreover, this finding relates to organisational management literature, in which organisations and programmes are conceptualised as working within specific contexts ( Johns, 2006 ). These contexts, involving local and national influences, it has been argued, have an impact on organisational practices ( Liu et al, 2015 ), performance ( O'Toole Jr and Meier, 2014 ), and leadership appraisals ( Hernandez et al, 2016 ). To our knowledge, this is the first time that explicit examples of different levels of influences have been given and identified as impacting on mentoring programme practices.…”

The Influence of Confucianism on Corporate Environmental Investment: Evidence from Chinese Private Firms

“…Therefore, the regression results of models (1), (2), (3), and (4) well support hypothesis 1. From the regression results of control variables, it can be seen that the regression coefficients of Male, Ownership, Profit, Sales, and Supervisors in column models (2) and 4were all significantly positive. This suggests that companies led by male entrepreneurs, with greater owners' equity, better profitability, higher sales, and a board of directors, have higher levels of environmental investment.…”

“…Many external factors have been investigated by scholars. Liu et al [2] divide corporate environmental practices into two categories, basic and proactive, and find that a perception of clear political commitment is positively correlated with the basic environmental practice of enterprises, but not with proactive environmental practices. Conversely, confusing regulatory standards and enforcement is negatively associated with corporate efforts in both basic and proactive environmental practices.…”

Top-Down and Bottom-Up Approaches to Environmental Governance in China: Evidence from the River Chief System (RCS)

“…Despite the differences in their intended objectives, those reforms were unvaryingly obsessed with detailing economic development targets, oftentimes in the form of GDP figures, that local governments were expected to fulfill by using all their discretionary power and resources [ 30 , 31 , 32 ]. Although undeniably contributing to local economic prosperity, this one-dimensional GDP growth-oriented mindset on the part of the top leadership had unintendedly undermined local officials’ commitment to environmental protection and subsequently led to the emergence of a plethora of environmental problems [ 14 , 33 , 34 , 35 ].…”