Enforcement practice, development assistance and servicing clients: progressing compliance with wastewater discharge regulations in industrialised north Vietnam
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Rapidly industrialising regions in low-middle income nations are an integral part of global manufacturing systems, and chemical discharge into their water systems from industry places pressure on weakly-developed environmental institutions. This research examines the specific case of wastewater pollution law enforcement practices at provincial scales in north Vietnam. It seeks to understand dominant logics and practical norms that help constitute the institutional context in which environmental officials operate, in part through considering responses to foreign assistance. The research explores the dynamic and diverse interactions amongst institutional context, organisational systems and models, and the practice of enforcement, to inform regulatory theory and intervention thinking. An analytical framework grounded in layered institutional analysis and critical realism is developed and tested for studying such phenomena. The thesis analyses practice, systems and business models in provincial environmental departments in Hà Nội, Bắc Ninh and Hải Phòng who received Canadian and Japanese development agency assistance, and a control province Vĩnh Phúc. The research involved 65 interviews with officials and development agency consultants; diary keeping by officials to capture evidence of practice; and analysis of provincial government and development agency documentation. The hypothesis was that resistance to and uptake of systems and practices promoted by development agencies would reveal constraints and opportunities for strengthening regulatory practice in this society, and in other rapidly industrialising societies where corrupt practices are endemic. The thesis concludes that enforcement is constrained by institutional logics and regulatory framings that drive conciliatory solutions, in order to retain industrial investment and make money under industry-as-client servicing models. Officials retain tactical space to place some pressure on non-compliant industry. Officials deploy flexibility and discretion to negotiate deals to progress regulatory compliance over time, while accommodating institutional and relational counter-pressures favouring the status quo. Systems enabling prioritisation, information sharing and follow up have the potential to support progress. It was anticipated that capacity, autonomy, reach and professionalism in evidence gathering would be enhanced by development assistance when compared to the control, however the indicators assessed were independent, with the exception of capacity indicators correlating to Canadian assistance.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.007 | 0.006 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".