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To tackle China's profound environmental problems, Chinese leaders are now incorporating environmental targets in 5-year plans and experimenting with market-based mechanisms to supplement their traditional command and control mechanisms for environmental protection. In the recent years, China has produced a series of green policies, including green tax, green procurement, as well as green policies relevant to the financial sector, namely, green credit, insurance, and security policies. Of the three, the green credit policy is the most advanced, with three agencies (the Ministry of Environmental Protection, the Peoples' Bank of China, and the China Banking Regulatory Commission) sharing the responsibility for implementation. The policy, approaching its fourth year of implementation, has proved resistant to China's massive economic upheaval following the global financial crisis. Its future success depends on effective environmental data collection and dissemination, technical guidance, and provision of true financial incentives for banks. The continued success in implementation could potentially provide China with the experience and confidence to address new challenges, such as the environmental and social conduct of its enterprises overseas. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The emphasis of the world's transboundary water law has gradually shifted in the past half century from water resources development to water resources management and environmental protection. This change in institutional focus is a natural outcome of changing resource conditions, in particular the high levels of water resources development achieved in many regions as well as rising economic prosperity and associated changes in environmental perception. Surprisingly, this analysis reveals that transboundary water law in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) follows these global trends even though SSA's levels of water resources development, economic prosperity, and food security are significantly lower than any other region in the world. These findings suggest that the nature of SSA's transboundary water law may be largely "handed down" from other parts of the world with different realities than those present in SSA. Recognizing this relationship can provide important lessons for improving transboundary water governance in the region. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study takes a fresh look at the regulatory determinants of foreign direct investment (FDI) by asking whether the stringency and sustainability of environmental regulations affect FDI flows across 25 Western and Eastern European countries. Unlike the earlier literature, which considered only host country characteristics, this article focuses on the difference in the regulatory environments in home and host economies. The data suggest that more stringent environmental regulations in the investor's country relative to those in the potential host country are positively correlated with the probability of investment as well as with the volume of FDI. The results also show that firms in industries with higher abatement costs tend to invest more abroad. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Costa Rica's Biodiversity Law of 1998 is perhaps the most comprehensive legislation implementing the Convention on Biological Diversity. It includes provisions to better protect the intellectual property rights of rural communities regarding uses they have developed for natural resources and plants and animals they have bred. This article addresses how groups representing these peoples-the National Indigenous Board and National Peasant Board-obtained these provisions despite opposition from traditionally more powerful scientific and business communities. Data were collected on the formulation of the Biodiversity Law through qualitative techniques, including intensive interviews and archival research. It was found that fortuitous political conditions, or political opportunity structures, were crucial to the success of organizations representing rural communities. These supports included better-resourced allies, favorable international legal obligations and public opinion, and existing law that could be built on. Indicating broader patterns, it also was found that such political conditions have been salient during indigenous and peasant political activism elsewhere in Latin America and during formulation of similar biodiversity policy in developing countries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Through a case study of analyzing the print media coverage of an environmental controversy, this article aims to assess the status of transparency in China's environmental governance. The case study is based on a landmark January 2000 event in relation to the Nanjiang Industrial Park in Sihui, a county city located in the Pearl River Delta region of Guangdong Province. The findings of the case study send discordant and mixed signals, showing that transparency in the process of China's environmental governance is vulnerable to the extra-media factor-government control of information and the prior consideration of economic imperatives. Although substantial progress has been made in terms of increasing the degree of transparency in environmental protection work, administrative practices have simultaneously enriched the government's experience in the control of information for governance in the environmental arena, thus presenting an ongoing paradox. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Today's fragmented world demands creative institutional arrangements to allow governments, international organizations, and civil society actors to join forces in addressing global environmental problems. This article discusses the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) as foreseen under Article 12 of the Kyoto Protocol in the context of new models of governance. To do so, it depicts CDM's history, institutional setting and participatory elements. The CDM serves as a concrete example of how new collaborative networks consisting of nation states and nonstate actors can help in implementing international trea- ties. The articles traces the history of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change process to provide a sufficient background for a more detailed discussion of the CDM. On that basis, it provides an analysis of the CDM, and depict the Prototype Carbon Fund, administered by the World Bank, as an example for an innovative model of cooperation between the private and the public sectors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]