Over the last decade, Chinese citizens and NGOs have started to take action against
industrial pollution, pluralizing the regulatory landscape originally occupied by
administrative agencies. Regulatory pluralism here has an authoritarian logic, occurring
without the retreat of party-state control. Under such logic, the party-state both
needs and fears new actors for their positive and negative roles in controlling risk
and maintaining stability. Consequently, the regime’s relation to regulatory pluralism
is ambivalent, shifting between support and restriction. This presentation looks at
the preconditions under which citizens have entered the Chinese environmental regulatory
landscape. It looks in particular at how power imbalances shape environmental awareness
and activism and how this affects the regulatory function citizens can have. It concludes
that in a context of regulatory pluralism, regulation and empowerment mutually interact
and how regulators must focus on how to regulate in a way that is not disempowering
to citizens.
BENJAMIN van ROOIJ is the John S. and Marilyn Long Chair Professor of US-China Business
and Law at the University of California. His research focuses on implementation of
law in a comparative perspective. Since 2000, he has studied how lawmaking affects
implementation, regulatory law enforcement and compliance, and rights invocation and
legal empowerment. A central theme is how implementation of law can be improved in
the context of emerging markets where weak enforcement and widespread violations of
law create a vicious circle undermining compliance.
Venue: Melbourne Law School, 185 Pelham Street, Carlton
Register: www.law.unimelb.edu.au/alc
Enquiries: law-alc@unimelb.edu.au
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