This project seeks to understand how the environmental can be protected and environmental law can be implemented when state administrative law enforcement is weak. To do so, the project looks at how non-administrative actors in China have started to play regulatory roles. It studies how citizens, NGOs, courts, and procurates have started to assume roles as environmental regulators.

This project looks both at the conditions under which such roles were assumed, as well as the effects this has had both on pollution and on these actors themselves. The study contributes directly to ideas about regulatory governance, legal empowerment and access to justice. Practically, the study helps to unearth more effective and efficient ways to regulate pollution in a context of weak state enforcement that may help to develop better ways to deal with increasingly alarming environmental conditions in China and similar countries.