环保法庭何以有效?OA北大核心CSSCICSTPCD

In China,the status of the environmental court has evolved from a judicial policy to a national policy.However,an academic consensus regarding its ecological impact has yet to be reached,primarily due to the ambiguity surrounding the mechanisms through which it exerts its effects.To address the issue,this study attempts to provide insight into the underlying impact mechanisms contribut-ing to the ecological impact of the environmental court.From the perspective of judicial activism,this study theoretically identified two potential impact paths:government-court collaboration and societal attention towards environmental issues.The first path can be more specifically delineated as'government's environmental attention'and'government's regulatory efforts,'while the second path can be further specified as'public attention'and'media attention.'Subsequently,a time-varying difference-in-differences model was utilized to empirically investigate the effects of establishing environmental courts in 135 cities between 2011 and 2020 on emissions of local in-dustrial pollution.Additionally,a causal mediation model was employed to test the hypotheses concerning the impact paths.The empiri-cal results showed that,cities with environmental courts had 11.9%lower industrial pollution emissions compared to cities without such courts,and'government's regulatory efforts'and'media attention'played important mediating roles in this relationship.These results supported the opinion that the effectiveness of the government's actions surpassed mere rhetoric and that the role of media discourse outweighed that of individual attention.Heterogeneity analysis further revealed that the amendment of the Environmental Protection Law in 2015 had enhanced the governance effectiveness of environmental courts,with their impact being more pronounced in economi-cally underdeveloped regions.Regarding the impact paths,'government's regulatory efforts'demonstrated greater stability,while'me-dia attention'exhibited significant spatio-temporal heterogeneity.This study highlights the significance of judicial activism,urging scholars to direct greater attention towards the externality of environmental courts.The policy implication advocates for a moderately ex-panded territorial reach of environmental courts and an augmentation of public engagement within environmental judiciary.