Public participation in China: the case for environmental enforcement

Abstract This paper addresses the impact of formal and institutionalized public participation on local environmental enforcement in contemporary China. I gathered 14 years (2000–2014) worth of public participation data (e.g. letters, office visits, local NPC and CPPCC proposals) from official sources (e.g. Chinese Environmental Yearbook, National Bureau of Statistics) and developed a quantitative model to explain how different channels of institutionalized public participation influence processed environmental violation cases. My findings show that institutionalized public participation, in particular, petition-oriented office visits has an impact on facilitating China’s local environmental enforcement due to its potential risks to political stability. This is evidenced by the relationship between office visits and the increased number of environmental penalties. I also found that institutionalized public participation, such as petitioning, functions as leverage against the government apart from as a platform for policy feedback.