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The enforcement behaviour of environmental officials in developing countries has not received adequate attention despite enormous challenges to regulatory enforcement in those areas. Accordingly, this article examines the relationship between perceptions of support from local governments and society and evaluations of enforcement effectiveness. A model in which organisational commitment partially mediates these relationships was tested using a sample of 202 enforcement officials in Guangzhou. China. The findings confirm a partial mediating role for organisational commitment and an interaction effect between government and societal support. A plot of this interaction reveals that when enforcement officials perceive high levels of governmental support, societal support further enhances their perceptions of enforcement effectiveness. However, when they perceive government support to be low, higher levels of societal support appear to diminish their assessments of enforcement effectiveness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The ability to achieve urban sustainability has become an indication of the competence of a municipal government aiming to gain world class status for the city. While both Guangzhou and Hong Kong are Chinese cities having their own formulation of urban sustainability, the implementation details and the actual sustainability blueprints are very different. As a result, the outcomes and prospects for urban sustainability are also different. Hong Kong has adopted a less integrative and more institutionally-oriented approach for urban sustainability Guangzhou has used the conventional approach to formulate an integrated sustainability programme for its local Agenda 21. Hong Kong's action plan emphasizes improving coordination, making objective assessments and achieving consistency in policy-making. Guangzhou, on the other hand, emphasizes the meeting of concrete environmental targets. Unfortunately, the new institutional arrangement and monitoring tools adopted by Hong Kong have not been able to achieve the original intent and neither is there the intention to go tot) far beyond the weak sustainability approach. On the contrary, Guangzhou has planned and attempted to incorporate industrial ecology in its development regime while heavily investing into pollution control programmes and pushing forward a green community programme at the grass-roots level. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]