Project description

Having rights does not mean that one’s rights are protected. Successful rights protection requires an effective mobilization of those rights, through legal, political or other means. Indeed, even if citizens invoke their rights, that does not necessarily mean that those rights then are indeed protected. A key issue here is whether potential infringers will respond to the invocation of rights, and will refrain from damaging behavior. This project focuses on the one hand on the early processes of rights invocation: grievance development and claim development. Here it contributes to the literature on access to justice, by offering a unique, empirical perspective on i) how people recognize problems that require action, and ii) how they subsequently decide what type of action and claim to make. On the other hand, the project also focuses on the question how the invocation of rights by citizens can help to contribute to the regulation of harm and risk (i.e., the regulatory role of citizens and NGOs). In both cases, the project focuses on pollution victims, civic organizations and pollution in China.

This project was funded by a grant from the Dutch Research Council’s Science for Global Development programme (NWO WOTRO) and was carried out by Benjamin van Rooij (C-LAB) in collaboration with (among others) Kathinka Fürst (Duke Kunshan University, environmental governance), Wu Yunmei (Yunnan Academy of Social Sciences, sociology) and Garry Gray (Victoria University, Sociology).

Relevant publications and works in progress:

• Gray, G., & Van Rooij, B. (2020 (forthcoming)). Regulatory Empowerment: How Enabling and Controlling Forms of Power Obstruct Citizen-based Regulation. Regulation & Governance.
• Furst, Kathinka, and Benjamin Van Rooij. "Defining Regulation in an Age of Governance: Lessons Drawn from Civil Pollution Regulation in China." Draft paper in progress (2020).
• van Rooij, Benjamin, Yang Su, Peng Ding, and Wanhong Zhang. "Getting on the Road to Justice: Understanding the Stages of Grievance and Claim Development." Draft paper in progress (2019).
• van Rooij, Benjamin, and Kathinka Furst. "Rights Based Empowerment: Understanding the Interaction between Power and Rights Mobilization." UC Irvine School of Law Research Paper 2014, no. 21 (2014): 1-28.
• van Rooij, Benjamin. "The People's Regulation, Citizens and Implementation of Law in China." Columbia Journal of Asian Law 25, no. 2 (2012): 116-80.
• van Rooij, Benjamin, Gerald E. Fryxell, Carlos Wing-Hung Lo, and Wei Wang. "From Support to Pressure: The Dynamics of Social and Governmental Influences on Environmental Law Enforcement in Guangzhou City, China." Regulation & Governance 7, no. 3 (2013): 321-47.
• van Rooij, Benjamin, Anna Lora-Wainwright, Yunmei Wu, and Yiyun Zhang. "The Compensation Trap: The Limits of Community-Based Pollution Regulation in China." Pace Environmental Law Review 29, no. 3 (2012): 701-45.
• van Rooij, Benjamin. "The People Vs. Pollution: Understanding Citizen Action against Pollution in China." The Journal of Contemporary China 19, no. 63 (2010): 55-79.