A Study On The Evolvement Of Regulatory Approaches In Environmental Law

Private rights setting and government regulation are two basic conventional regulatory approaches in environmental law. Restricted by the"private rights setting"approach's latent defects and the actual transaction costs, environmental externalities can not be entirely"internalized"by individual private rights. As a result, government regulation has become the predominate form of regulatory approaches to environmental protection. However, in China's practice,"government failure"and regulatory agencies'lacks of capacities and resources have lowered the"government regulation"approach's efficiency. As a new approach, the disclosure of environmental information opens up the traditional bilateral relationship between the regulator and the regulated to include other social institutions, making it possible to reinforce and augment direct regulatory monitoring and enforcement through third-party monitoring and incentives. Due to this distinctive function, the disclosure of environmental information has become a notable international trend and is defined as the"third phase"in the evolvement of regulatory approaches. Among other countries, it has already been adopted in domestic laws. In China, the"information disclosure"approach has also achieved a rapid development in the past years, but environmental law has not yet evolved to emphasize disclosure of information as a primary focus and some areas need to be further improved. For this purpose, some suggestions for institutional improvements are proposed and discussed in this article.