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The scholarly work on China's environmental regulations in the context of "central–local" relations is dominated by the preference for a centralized approach. This article examines a centrally imposed and executed verification programme of locally reported pollution data, a rare and sustained central effort to enforce an environmental policy, namely the national pollution reduction target system. The programme was established in 2007 to curtail perceived widespread data falsification and to enhance the quality of emission data, the basis for assessing local compliance with targets. Based on an analysis of official documents and interviews with environmental officials and industry representatives, this article found that the verification programme appears to have reduced the overreporting problem with emission data, enhanced local monitoring and enforcement capacity, and to a certain degree deterred violations due to the increased frequency of national and local inspections. Nevertheless, significant challenges remain. Verification is highly resource intensive, it has involved little external oversight and public participation, the central authority has exerted significant yet unchecked discretionary powers, and poor data quality has remained an issue. Over time, the verification programme appears to have turned into essentially a "numbers game." All those challenges indicate that a centralized enforcement approach is arguably ineffective in addressing China's long-standing problem of weak environmental policy implementation. This study also sheds lights on the classical "principal-agent" theory in the study of public bureaucracy. Not only does the principal distrust the agent, which is the main concern of the theory, but the agent also distrusts the principal. (China Q/GIGA)

AbstractThis paper explores how and whyChinese courts became involved in regulating pollution by aiding administrative agencies in executing sanction decisions and collecting pollution levies. It also studies the effects of their regulatory involvement, both in terms of deterrence inferred from available information, as well as the compliance behavior of regulated actors defined as payment of regulatory penalties. It finds that judicial involvement in regulatory enforcement proved to be short‐lived and depended on a particular context at a particular period of time when a regulatory need coincided with administrative and financial judicial needs and particular judges. The paper also finds that court involvement enhanced deterrence in terms of certainty of punishment and to some extent the severity of punishment; however that deterrent effect was undermined by the close relationship between the courts and the regulated entities as fines and levies were almost always negotiated. In effect, deterrence increased the number of compliers paying levies without increasing the depth of compliance in terms of their full payment.

The primary objective of the Administrative Litigation Law (ALL) in China is to curb administrative misconduct by empowering citizens to file administrative litigation cases (ALCs). Many empirical studies have found that the ALL has made administrative organs more careful in following the law while exercising their powers. However, the existing literature has not identified either variations in the effects of individual ALCs on agency behavior or factors that may explain such variations. This paper analyzes how ALCs have changed bureaucratic behavior in the context of environmental protection. It uses results from detailed reviews of comprehensive court case files for 14 ALCs in two counties in Hubei Province and in-depth interviews with all parties involved in the lawsuits. The analysis shows that the ALCs have enhanced the legal sensitivity of administrative organs but only in cases in which: (i) the officials in charge of administrative enforcement had strong knowledge of legal issues, and (ii) those officials agreed with the courts' judgments regarding the legal deficiencies. (China J/GIGA)

AbstractThe existing literature on China's 1989 Administrative Litigation Law (ALL) has rarely discussed a minor provision that permits administrative agencies to enlist court assistance in enforcing administrative decisions. Focusing on court enforcement of pollution levies, this study examines how and why ALL has been employed so extensively by administrative agencies, environmental protection bureaus (EPBs) in this context. The study is based on interviews with judges, EPB officials and polluters involved in court actions as well as court statistical data from 1992 to 2005 for Hubei province. EPBs' heavy reliance on court enforcement for collecting pollution levies and fines resulted from incentives that encouraged the formation of mutually beneficial relationships between courts and EPBs in the 1990s. Court involvement has enhanced EPBs' enforcement powers, but the courts' engagement in enforcement has neither curtailed EPBs' arbitrary exercise of discretionary power nor induced polluters to reduce waste discharges.

Proposals for greenhouse-gas reductions have been met with widespread skepticism in the developing world, in part because such countries find their conventional air-pollution problems more pressing. The goal of this article is to examine whether reductions in carbon emissions that are ancillary to conventional pollutant reductions from a policy to phase out small boilers in down-town Taiyuan, China are large enough to make such policies attractive carbon-reducing investments to developed countries. Based on the authors' survey data, there are significant carbon benefits (on the order of 50% to 95% reduction) associated with this policy, with large reduction potential elsewhere in China. Although the cost for boilers that switched out of coal was almost U.S. $2,900 per ton of SO2 reduced, these ancillary carbon reductions are free from a social perspective. Such initiatives represent a potentially significant source of carbon reductions that developed countries could help pay for, bringing significant health and other benefits to the country.