Environmental courts, industrial pollution, and grain production: the reach of judicial environmental enforcement in Chinese cities

Abstract

Abstract

Judicial environmental enforcement operates through litigation, therefore the entitlements it protects are only binding when a discharge can be traced to an identified source within the jurisdiction that adjudicates it. This delineation logic implies that specialized environmental courts reduce pollution selectively, and that their reach stops short of sectors they do not adjudicate. The second implication is important for food systems, because increasing environmental governance in agrarian economies is widely expected to cost local food production. We test both using the staggered establishment of environmental courts in Chinese prefecture-level cities during 2003–2018, utilizing a common sample of 4,168 city-year data from 285 cities, 109 of which had a court. Two-way fixed-effects and Callaway–Sant’Anna estimates are shown on identical samples, together with a balanced panel, event-time paths, adoption-hazard and trend diagnostics, and HonestDiD sensitivity. Both estimators include industrial wastewater density, which is a point-source discharge that occurs within municipal boundaries. Sulfur dioxide, which disperses across jurisdictions, is only considered in pooled estimate, and the formal contrast between the two responses is negative in every cohort-aware specification. Sensitivity analysis limits how far these conclusions travel: the wastewater sign holds under trend assumptions similar to the observed pre-establishment pattern, and the cross-pollutant gap is smaller than this design resolves. Grain production per resident does not decline, and equivalence tests limit the largest decline these data admit. Specialized environmental adjudication develops as a selective, attribution-dependent enforcement whose reach is limited to what a court can attribute, with no detectable impact on local grain production.