Benjamin van Rooij

The People vs. Pollution: understanding citizen action against pollution in China

Chinese pollution victims have increasingly started to resort to political and legal action to protect their interests. This paper analyzes such activism by studying how citizens identify the necessity to initiate action against pollution and by investigating the obstacles they meet when attempting to take action. The paper highlights the importance of state and intermediary institutions to aid citizens in understanding the seriousness of pollution and overcoming the obstacles they face. It shows, however, that often such aid is not available, and that state institutions when aligned with industrial interests restrict rather than support citizen action. When this occurs, citizen activism becomes an isolated affair, resulting in adversarial relations with state and industry, sometimes escalating to violence and repression of activists. The paper concludes that isolated activism forces a new look at concepts such as ‘embeddedness’ and ‘rightful resistance’ to capture citizen activism and contentious politics in China.Chinese pollution victims have increasingly started to resort to political and legal action to protect their interests. This paper analyzes such activism by studying how citizens identify the necessity to initiate action against pollution and by investigating the obstacles they meet when attempting to take action. The paper highlights the importance of state and intermediary institutions to aid citizens in understanding the seriousness of pollution and overcoming the obstacles they face. It shows, however, that often such aid is not available, and that state institutions when aligned with industrial interests restrict rather than support citizen action. When this occurs, citizen activism becomes an isolated affair, resulting in adversarial relations with state and industry, sometimes escalating to violence and repression of activists. The paper concludes that isolated activism forces a new look at concepts such as ‘embeddedness’ and ‘rightful resistance’ to capture citizen activism and contentious politic...

Fragile convergence: understanding variation in the enforcement of China's industrial pollution law

Official statistics and independent survey data show that in the last decade China has witnessed a remarkable change in its enforcement of environmental pollution violations, moving toward more formalistic and coercive law enforcement with more enforcement cases as well as higher fines. The data also show that there is considerable regional variation with coastal areas having more and higher punishments than those inland. This article explores these findings, seeking to understand the explanation and meaning of these temporal and regional variation patterns. The study shows how enforcement varies when there is a convergence of governmental, social, and economic institutional forces. The article argues that the basis for such convergence has been fragile, as national pressures have lacked consistency and local community and government support evaporates when dominant sources of income are at stake.

The People’s Regulation: Citizens and Implementation of Law in China

This paper discusses how China has made a move towards society-based regulation, enabling citizens to aid in the implementation of regulatory law. It discusses the necessity of this development in the light of the government’s problems in enforcing its laws. The paper contends that citizens have had some success in improving regulatory effects to mitigate risk. However, it also finds that citizen-based regulation reforms have been halfhearted, as existing and recently introduced authoritarian restrictions obstruct citizens and civic organizations to become successful co-regulators. The paper concludes that at its worst China has developed a form of regulation by escalation, where ironically the exact incentive structures for Chinese regulatory and judicial officials to prevent unrest, also provide an incentive for citizens to create instability as a successful strategy to get regulatory law implemented. And thus, China’s halfhearted approach to regulatory governance with its focus on stability may be destabilizing.

Learning to live with pollution: The making of environmental subjects in a Chinese industrialized village

It is often assumed that, when citizens do not oppose pollution, it is due to their ignorance of its effects or to structural barriers to change. This article argues that a sense that pollution is inevitable is also a major obstacle. We outline the gradual formation of environmental subjects who have learnt to value their environment in ways consonant with the seemingly inevitable presence of pollution. We argue that perceptions of inevitability were produced by: (1) the subordination of villagers to their leaders and the dependence of both on local industries; (2) experiences with protests; and (3) the framing of the exploitation of local resources as part of a broader national project of development. This study sheds light on the study of environmental protests in China by illustrating how parameters for contention come into being and how they are intertwined with the governance of the village and of the environment.

Greening industry without enforcement? An assessment of the World Bank's pollution regulation model for developing countries

The best comparative and overview source now available for knowledge about pollution regulation in developing countries is the 2000 World Bank policy research report called Greening Industry. The World Bank finds that there is a new model for pollution regulation in lower- and middle-level income countries that is an alternative to “traditional�? command and control regulation. The new model stresses flexible norms and nonstate pressures on regulated enterprises coming from communities and markets. This article presents an investigation into this new model. It finds that the prevalence of weak law enforcement may undermine the new models potential to control pollution in developing countries. It also contends that social and market pressures only occur under certain circumstances often not found in lower- and middle-level income countries. Therefore, the article concludes that developing countries require smart mixes of various regulatory instruments appropriate in the given state and nonstate regulatory capacities, instead of contrasting state and nonstate regulation.

Bringing Justice to the Poor: Bottom-Up Legal Development Cooperation

In the last decade bottom-up approaches to legal development cooperation have become increasingly popular. Examples are reform ideas and programmes using concepts such as ‘access to justice’ and ‘legal empowerment.’ These approaches share a common concern that legal interventions should benefit the poor, and that their needs and preferences should form the basis for legal reforms. Proponents argue that these approaches are important alternatives to ineffective pre-existing legal reform practices which were based on ‘the rule of law orthodoxy.’ This paper critically discusses the content, context and merits of such bottom-up approaches. It concludes that while these approaches offer advantages, they should not substitute but complement pre-existing legal development cooperation practices and the rule of law paradigm on which they are based. The emergence of these new approaches shows how much legal development cooperation is a field of trends, where doubts about their effectiveness force legal reformers to regularly shift from one paradigm to the next, enthusiastically applauding the seemingly new, while sacrificing the caricaturized old.

Centralizing Trends and Pollution Law Enforcement in China

This article analyses centralizing trends that may be able to reduce the negative influence of local protectionism on environmental law enforcement in China. The article finds that as centralizing trends unfolded, enforcement over time has become stricter and more frequent, however with only minor effects in reducing pollution. Moreover it finds a situation of uneven enforcement with richer and more urbanized areas having much stronger and more frequent enforcement than inland areas. Centralizing trends may thus have spurred stronger enforcement, but concurrently allowed for an uneven enforcement. At the same time, the article finds a continued local influence, keeping enforcement too weak to have much effect in reducing pollution and allowing for local interests to shape enforcement into unequal outcomes.

The enforcement–compliance paradox: Implementation of pesticide regulation in China

This article, in a study of amoral cost–benefit analysis, legitimacy and capacity to obey the law, seeks to understand why Chinese farmers obey or break pesticide rules. It uses data gathered through intensive fieldwork at a local level, including interviews with 31 pesticide experts and officials and 119 vegetable farmers in central China. It uncovers an enforcement–compliance paradox: a situation where law enforcement concentrates exactly on those rules that are least likely to be broken and on those regulated actors who are most likely to comply. It finds two explanations. First, enforcement policy simply may not be aware of which rules are more likely to be complied with and which regulated actors are more likely to comply even when there is limited deterrence. Second, technocratic risk-averse enforcement policy may be oriented towards those rules and actors for which violation – theoretically – results in the greatest damage, not towards those rules that are more likely to be broken and those actors who are more likely to break them.

For Whom Does Deterrence Affect Behavior? Identifying Key Individual Differences

Deterrence threats are essential mechanisms for affecting behavior, yet they are often ineffective. The literature is beginning to consider individual differences underlying differential susceptibility to deterrence. The present study sampled 223 adults from Amazon Mechanical Turk and used an experimental cheating paradigm to examine the role of 3 individual differences, including morality, self-control, and rule orientation, underlying differential susceptibility to deterrence. The results indicate that deterrence threats may be more influential for people who have low moral disengagement, who possess more self-control, or who are more rule oriented. These findings indicate that important individual differences underlie susceptibility to deterrence.

Lawmaking in China: Understanding Substantive and Procedural Changes

This paper provides a sociolegal overview of law and lawmaking in China. It combines existing studies with original data published by the National People’s Congress as well as new case studies of recent lawmaking processes. The paper focuses its analysis on the development of regulatory laws that seek to prevent and control risk, including environmental, food safety, land, labor, and occupational health laws. The paper finds large changes in the substance of legislation over the past two decades. Amid generally massive growth in lawmaking at all levels, national legislation has become more ambitious, with a greater regulatory burden. It has become more specific, allowing for less discretion. And it has grown stronger teeth, with greater sanctions against violations. These regulatory laws allow for more public participation, albeit within a tightly confined authoritarian space. Such substantive changes come as the process of lawmaking has evolved. While central leadership retains strong control over lawmaking, the process has become more transparent, allowing more actors to exert influence. Successful legislative entrepreneurs are able to shape lawmaking by timing their advocacy at the right stage of the legislative process and, if possible, linking it to ongoing crises.