2011/10/01 by Christopher Marquis, Jianjun Zhang, Yanhua Zhou · 191 citations
Business, Management and Accounting · #Bureaucracy #Business #China #Corporate Social Responsibility Reporting #Economics #Enforcement #Environmental Sustainability in Business #Environmental regulation #Global trade, sustainability, and social impact #Government (linguistics) #Incentive #Industrial organization #Market economy #Political science #Public economics #Reputation #Transparency (behavior)
paper · doi:10.1525/cmr.2011.54.1.39
published in California Management Review 54(1), 39-63 (SAGE Publishing)
openalex publication_date 2011/10/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/03
This article analyzes the closing gap between regulation and enforcement of environmental protection in China and explores its implications for doing business there. It identifies three major dimensions that characterize change in regulatory systems: priorities and incentives, bureaucratic alignment, and transparency and monitoring. Using these dimensions, it describes the mechanisms that characterized China's prior period where enforcement of environmental protection was decoupled from regulation. Regulation and enforcement are becoming re-aligned. This is due to a change in national development strategy, reorganization of the bureaucracy, and increasing monitoring from both the government and general public. To address these changes, firms need to embrace environmental innovation and integrate local and global standards. They should also be more transparent and compete on reputation.