Factors influencing environmental inspection legislation: evidence from China

Abstract Factors influencing environmental legislation have long attracted scholarly attention, yet existing research tends to focus on laws regulating market actors while relatively neglecting legislation that oversees government regulators and enforcement agencies. This study addresses this gap by uncovering the complex configurations of political, institutional, economic, and social drivers behind local environmental inspection legislation in China. Drawing on stakeholder theory and configurational policymaking perspectives, fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA) was applied to data from all 31 provincial-level regions in mainland China, with five conditions—central political pressure, legislative stock for supervising administrative enforcement, secondary-sector economic share, allocation of enforcement resources, and public demand for environmental quality—calibrated into fuzzy-set scores. The analysis identifies three distinct pathways to robust local inspection laws: Industry-Driven Legislation under Low Central Pressure, Institutional Inertia-Driven Legislation, and Political Pressure-Driven Legislation. These results demonstrate that no single factor is sufficient on its own; instead, conjunctural combinations shape legislative outcomes. Higher-level accountability mechanisms and preexisting legal frameworks emerge as pivotal forces, while under certain configurations, local economic structures, public demand, and resource availability further influence enactment. These findings imply that legislation governing the supervision of environmental enforcement is shaped by multiple extra-legal factors, and that promoting the rule of law in environmental inspections requires moving beyond normative assertions to undertake in-depth consideration of higher-level political pressures, existing legislative stocks, and socio-economic development dynamics.