Enforcing Pollution Prevention in China: a Case Study of the 2014 Agricultural Waste Prevention and Control Law

• In Event: International Environmental/Green Crimes

Abstract

Rapid economic development in China has generated severe environmental degradation in the last few decades. Though the Chinese central government has promulgated national pollution laws, the implementation and enforcement of environmental regulations have often remained inadequate. This paper is a case study of the 2014 Agricultural Waste Prevention and Control Law which is the first national-level law designed to criminalize pollution caused by commercial animal husbandry in China. Though the regulations aimed to reduce agricultural waste pollution drastically, the study finds that the juxtaposing ministerial and provincial jurisdictions resulted in conflicting interpretations of the scale and evaluation criteria of the national policy, which directly caused half of the commercial husbandry farms to stay exempted from the effects of the regulations. Additionally, because of weak definitions of environmental crime, local Environmental Protection Bureau cadres rely on the arbitrary use of administrative power to enforce compliances from the commercial operators. The conflicting interests of the fragmented bureaucracy have severely constrained the economic instruments designed to incentivize resource utilization of husbandry waste. The ineffectiveness of the current implementation model requires a thorough examination of how the center-local political relations influence the definition and enforcement of environmental crime in China’s environmental governance.

Author

• KuoRay Mao, Colorado State University