Dr. KuoRay Mao and Ph.D. student Nefratiri Weeks co-published three recent articles.

KuoRay Mao, Shuqin Jin, Yu Hu, Nefratiri Weeks & Liangjun Ye
“Environmental Conservation or the Treadmill of Law: A Case Study of the Post-2014 Husbandry Waste Regulations in China” – International Journal of Offender Therapy and Comparative Criminology Read it here
ABSTRACT
As industrialized animal agriculture expanded rapidly in the last decade, the resultant pollution has generated widespread despoliation of natural resources and environmental victimization in rural China. This study examines the formulation and implementation of national environmental regulations from 2014 to 2019 and finds that the juxtaposing ministerial and provincial jurisdictions resulted in conflicting interpretations of the scale and evaluation criteria of the national policy. We argue that the regulations are more than centralized conservation programs designed to reduce environmental pollution caused by the expansion of animal husbandry. Instead, these regulations are fundamentally state-led rural development initiatives that utilize the designations of ecological protection zones to reconfigure land use and promote scale-up production in agricultural structural adjustment initiatives. The enforcement of these environmental regulations, therefore, constitutes a treadmill of law (ToL) that accelerated the geographical specialization and function intensification of the Chinese husbandry sector.

KuoRay Mao, Qian Zhang, Yongji Xue & Nefratiri Weeks
“Toward a socio-political approach to water management: successes and limitations of IWRM programs in rural northwestern China” – Frontiers of Earth Science Read it here
ABSTRACT
In rural north-western China, the tension between economic growth and ecological crises demonstrates the limitations of dominant top-down approaches to water management. In the 1990s, the Chinese government adopted the Integrated Water Resources Management (IWRM) approach to combat the degradation of water and ecological systems throughout its rural regions. While the approach has had some success at reducing desertification, water shortage, and ecological deterioration, there are important limitations and obstacles that continue to impede optimum outcomes in water management. As the current IWRM approach is instituted through a top-down centralized bureaucratic structure, it often fails to address the socio-political context in which water management is embedded and therefore lacks a complete treatment of how power is embedded in the bureaucracy and how it articulates through economic growth imperatives set by the Chinese state. The approach has relied on infrastructure heavy and technocratic solutions to govern water demand, which has worked to undermine the focus on integration and public participation. Finally, the historical process through which water management mechanisms have been instituted are fraught with bureaucratic fragmentation and processes of centralization that work against some of its primary goals such as reducing uncertainty and risk in water management systems. This article reveals the historical, social, political, and economic processes behind these shortcomings in water management in rural northwestern China by focusing on the limitations of a top-down approach that rely on infrastructure, technology, and quantification, and thereby advances a more holistic, socio-political perspective for water management that considers the state-society dynamics inherent in water governance in rural China.