Support for a high-ambition plastics treaty is gaining strength, particularly within global civil society and among lower-income developing countries. Still, opposition to binding measures – such as obligations to regulate petrochemicals or reduce global plastics production – remains intense and widespread. We propose the concept of a “petrochemical historical bloc” to help reveal the depth and extent of the forces opposing strong global governance of plastics. At the bloc’s core are petrostates and industry, especially producers of oil and gas feedstock, petrochemicals and plastics. Extending its influence are broader social forces – including certain political and economic institutions, consultancy firms and nongovernmental organizations – that reinforce and legitimize the discourses and tactics thwarting a high-ambition treaty. This bloc is driving up plastics production, externalizing the costs of pollution, distorting scientific knowledge and lobbying to derail negotiations. Yet the petrochemical historical bloc is neither monolithic nor all-powerful. Investigating differing interests and evolving politics within this bloc, we contend, can expose disingenuous rhetoric, weaken low-ambition alliances and reveal opportunities to overcome resistance to ambitious governance. In light of this, and toward highlighting fractures and potential counter-alliances and strategies, we call for a global research inquiry to map the full scope and nature of the petrochemical historical bloc.

This article extends recent insights from new institutional economics to explore the relevance of the concept of meso-institutions. It does so through the exploration of the case of the Brazilian Forest Code, pointing out how and why meso-institutions play a key role in making public policies effective. More specifically, our study shows how crucial is the complete fulfilling of the functions characterising meso-institutions – namely translation, monitoring, and enforcement, to implement regulations and determine their effectiveness. Lessons are drawn regarding the complexities inherent in the creation, implementation, and operationalisation of rules across a multilayered institutional environment.

Sociolegal scholars have long debated the effectiveness of legal mobilization as a strategy for achieving social change. In addition to evaluating outcomes of wins and losses in court, they have identified several indirect effects of legal mobilization on social movements. Mobilizing new rights concepts can increase support for a movement, divide its base, and create new political allies or opponents. A win in court might lead to rights being institutionalized but not enforced, and it can serve to demobilize a movement base. This article contributes to this body of literature by arguing that movement groups can strategically mobilize the law to engage in co-optation from below – learning about an agency in order to build more effective organizing strategies. Using data gathered as a participant ethnographer in a grassroots environmental justice organization, I show how organizers used meetings with state regulators to learn how the agency interprets and enforces environmental laws and adjust their tactics in response. This study also demonstrates the value of conducting in-depth studies of local legal contests even as we seek to understand the role of the law in navigating our most pressing global challenges.

Reflexive environmental law (REL) enables an understanding of how law builds potential for private company reflexivity. Reflexivity helps to avoid lock-in, and enhances learning and self-organization to resolve complex sustainability challenges. Thus far, REL theory has excluded traditional command-and-control regulation as a form of REL. This limits the potential of REL to understand how legislation can drive reflexivity and create more effective governance. Our framework expands the definition of REL and sets out six types of regulatory instrument found in legislation that may, or may not, constitute forms of REL. The framework comprises three reflexive drivers – autonomy, accountability, and adjustability – and, under these, eleven REL techniques. Through examples taken from European environmental legislation, we explain the drivers’ relationship with different regulatory instruments. This taxonomy empowers regulators and scholars to understand both the reflexive potential of regulatory instruments and the possibility to make instruments more reflexive in specific contexts.

This article examines the growth of the waste and recycling sector in Sweden since the 1970s and seeks to identify the conditions for market growth and underlying business dynamics. The article identifies a slow growth pattern at aggregate level in the 1970s, while a major shift toward higher growth rates took place only in the mid-1990s. Resembling the findings of existing studies of German and US industry counterparts, Swedish recycling companies grew larger in the 1970s and more knowledge-intensive from the 1980s. Our study concludes that the growth of the Swedish recycling industry has been driven not only by government policies addressing household waste but even more so by large manufacturing firms that have increasingly demanded more complex recycling services over time.

This paper re-examines the pollution haven hypothesis (PHH) by taking environmental regulation in ambient regions as a critical determinant concurrent with own regulation. Exploiting the Two Control Zones policy in China as a quasi-natural experiment, we find that both the curbing effect of the local environmental regulation and the spillover effect of ambient regions affect high-polluting foreign direct investment (FDI) location. Moreover, reallocated FDI results in redistributing instead of reducing pollutant emissions. Our evidence enriched by spatial spillover primarily supports the PHH in the context of China. It suggests a national-wide coordinated environmental policy with a unified goal performs better than separately implementing stringent regulations in highly polluted areas.

This paper conducts a novel empirical analysis of the effect of environmental regulation on local pollution emissions by taking 84 cases of local legislation among 31 provinces in China during 1990–2009. We combine the matching methodology and difference-in-difference method to estimate the causal effect of provincial environmental legislation. Our estimation uncovers that there is no significant pollution abatement effect, however, environmental legislation helps to decrease local pollution emission only for those provinces that have stricter enforcement. Such results remain robust while considering the time lag effect, different types of pollutants, choice of different comparison groups and using of synthetic control method. Generally, our study shows the importance of the enforcement for environmental legislation in China.

This article investigates corporate responses to environmental regulation of fish farming in Norway, the world's largest producer and exporter of salmon. We note a puzzling strategic divergence within the industry: whereas small firms have strongly opposed new standards, large and multinational firms have supported or even demanded stricter regulation. Traditional models for business response strategies can explain this divergence only partly. We develop a supplementary, explanatory perspective focusing on company size and predatory opportunities, to show how large and dominant corporate players can use environmental regulation strategically to strengthen their competitive advantages at the expense of small and weaker rivals. This highlights a neglected dimension of regulatory effects and motives behind corporate demand for strict and costly standards. It aso shows how environmental regulations may cause trade-offs with local development concerns, relevant to other natural resource-based sectors evolving from smaller-scale production towards full-fledged industrialization.

This article provides an economic investigation into the underlying causes of industrial wastewater emissions. We examine the direct and the structural break-induced effect of national environmental regulation on industrial wastewater emissions. The results show that strict environmental regulation can partially offset the energy-induced effects imposed by the scale effects of foreign direct inflows and cause positive behavioral responses by either limiting coal usage or improving upon coal usage technology and shift towards clean energy sources. We find the absence of scale economies in the provision of environmental services in the industrial sector due to the poor nature of the technical processes of industries. We further highlight the importance of raising the investment in environmental treatment and embracing trade liberalization in the improvement of industrial wastewater management.

Coal has fueled China's rapid growth in recent decades, but it also severely pollutes the air and causes many health issues. The magnitude of the health damage caused by air pollution depends on the location of emission sources. In this paper, we look into the spatial distribution of coal-fired power plants, which are the major emission sources in China, and investigate the determining factors behind the distribution. We find that the driving factors are economic development and expansion of electricity grid coverage; the latter factor plays a key role in provinces that are less developed but have abundant coal resources. This suggests a way to reduce health damages caused by air pollution without harming the economy: attracting coal-fired plants to less populated areas by developing trans-province electricity trade and grid coverage.

The scholarly work on China's environmental regulations in the context of “central–local” relations is dominated by the preference for a centralized approach. This article examines a centrally imposed and executed verification programme of locally reported pollution data, a rare and sustained central effort to enforce an environmental policy, namely the national pollution reduction target system. The programme was established in 2007 to curtail perceived widespread data falsification and to enhance the quality of emission data, the basis for assessing local compliance with targets. Based on an analysis of official documents and interviews with environmental officials and industry representatives, this article found that the verification programme appears to have reduced the overreporting problem with emission data, enhanced local monitoring and enforcement capacity, and to a certain degree deterred violations due to the increased frequency of national and local inspections. Nevertheless, significant challenges remain. Verification is highly resource intensive, it has involved little external oversight and public participation, the central authority has exerted significant yet unchecked discretionary powers, and poor data quality has remained an issue. Over time, the verification programme appears to have turned into essentially a “numbers game.” All those challenges indicate that a centralized enforcement approach is arguably ineffective in addressing China's long-standing problem of weak environmental policy implementation. This study also sheds lights on the classical “principal-agent” theory in the study of public bureaucracy. Not only does the principal distrust the agent, which is the main concern of the theory, but the agent also distrusts the principal.

This article argues that the rise of transnational regulation has a transformative impact on law. It examines the field of transnational environmental regulation to show that its proliferation challenges the continued appropriateness of representations of law as (i) territorial, (ii) emanating from the state, (iii) composed of a public and private sphere, (iv) constitutive and regulatory in function, and (v) cohesive and regimented. Instead, law is increasingly perceived as (i) delocalized, (ii) flowing from a plurality of sources, (iii) organizationally inchoate, (iv) reflexive and coordinating in function, and (v) polycentric. Together, these shifts in perception amount to a transformation that the article identifies as the transnationalization of law. The article then explores three responses to the transnationalization of law. It distinguishes responses motivated by a desire to reclaim the traditional conception of law from those that seek to reconstruct law at the transnational level and responses that advocate a context-responsive reconceptualization of law. Each response, it will be shown, creates a different set of opportunities for, and challenges to, the relevance of law for transnational regulation.