(34) Administrative and Citizen Responses to Chinese Pollution: A Spatial Analysis

Scholars typically contend that approaches to environmental governance emphasizing administrative (coercive) mechanisms are in tension with those emphasizing citizen participation. States tend to emphasize top-down regulation... [ view full abstract ]

Scholars typically contend that approaches to environmental governance emphasizing administrative (coercive) mechanisms are in tension with those emphasizing citizen participation. States tend to emphasize top-down regulation or foster citizen participation in decentralized forms of environmental governance. Borzel and Risse, however, suggest that the threat of state legislation and coercion, which they call “the shadow of the state,” presses businesses to cooperate with citizen groups in decentralized forms of governance. Such models of environmental governance are based on studies of democracies, and it remains unclear how they apply to an authoritarian context such as China. China’s revised Environmental Protection Law (2015) strengthened both administrative coercion such as daily penalties, administrative detention, and halting of production to be used against polluters, as well as secured citizen participation in the forms of public interest litigation and access to environmental information. This paper examines how administrative coercion and citizen participation have variously developed in China’s provinces in the aftermath of the revised Environmental Protection Law, using ArcGIS, formal statistical analyses and qualitative interviews.