Shaoda WANG (University of Chicago)

Abstract

Countries around the world have launched public disclosure programs to stimulate citizen participation in environmental governance, yet little is known about when such participation affects regulation and pollution. We conducted a national-scale field experiment that randomly varied how citizen appeals about violations of pollution standards were sent to regulators or the violating firms. We find that, appealing a firm’s violations to the regulator publicly through social media increased both regulatory oversight and firm compliance, which reduced subsequent violations by 60% and air and water pollution emissions by 12.4% and 3.8%, respectively. In contrast, appealing to the regulator through private channels only caused a marginal improvement in environmental outcomes. Additionally, we randomly varied the proportion of firms subject to appeals at the prefecture-level and find that pollution appeals filed against the treated firms are unlikely to crowd out local governments’ regulation of control firms. Analysis of ambient pollution data and back-of-the-envelope calculations both suggest that encouraging more public participation in environmental governance would lead to significant improvements in China’s aggregate environmental quality.