China Policy Journal Volume 1, Number 1, Fall 2018 | Page 146

Chronic Noncompliance and Ineffective Enforcement in Guangzhou
ly include the official regulatory system,
the monitoring instruments, the administrative
structures, and the alternative
regulatory mechanisms voluntarily
adopted by polluting firms. Informal
factors refer to the political and social
construction of the seriousness of compliance
or noncompliance, the attitudes
and beliefs of the regulatees, and the social
pressures on the polluting firms to
comply with the regulatory standards.
In this research, we chose to focus
on one of the least environmentally
friendly behaviors of polluting firms,
namely, chronic noncompliance. These
firms have been caught and punished
numerous times for noncompliance
with the environmental rules, but they
still proceed without any significant
changes to their polluting behavior.
Guangzhou, the capital city of Guangdong
province and a major site of pollution
in the Pearl River Delta (PRD), is
selected for an intensive case study because
of data availability and representativeness
in terms of pollution regulations
and the polluting behavior of local
firms. This paper is organized as follows.
Section 2 introduces and explains
the data and the analytical framework.
Section 3 explains the features of chronic
noncompliance with environmental
regulation in Guangzhou. Section 4 examines
the nature and effectiveness of
the formal regulations related to pollution
in Guangzhou. Section 5 examines
the emerging informal approaches to
monitor corporate pollution behavior
in the case. Section 6 discusses the findings
and concludes.
2. Data and Analytical
Framework
2.1 Data
For this research, we have compiled
a comprehensive dataset
on the chronic offenses of corporate
polluters in Guangzhou based on
official environmental, provincial, and
municipal enforcement data covering
the period 2007–2015 (Table 1). The
official data on inspections, penalties,
and citizen reporting were acquired
from the Annual Report on the State
of Environment in Guangzhou (RSE)
and other open-source documents
available on the Guangzhou Environmental
Protection Bureau (EPB) website.
We also used the websites of the
Institute of Public and Environmental
Affairs (IPE) and the Guangdong Provincial
EPB for supplementary sources
of data. IPE is a Beijing-based nongovernment
organization (NGO) specialized
in creating interactive maps/data
of industrial pollution to facilitate public
participation in pollution control.
The IPE data focuses on large polluting
sources monitored by the Ministry of
Environmental Protection (MEP) and
is a useful source for researchers to find
information about sanctions related to
the state-monitored sources (SMSs).
In addition, the first author of the paper
conducted six interviews with district-level
EPB officers and staff of environmental
NGOs (ENGOs), which
provides contextual data for our interpretation
and analysis.
To identity cases of chronical
polluting firms, we created a set
of criteria that can be easily applied
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