Testing the MSF in a nondemocracy: The long march to China's soil pollution law

Because the multiple streams framework (MSF) was originally developed to explain agenda setting in democracies, it is unclear to what extent it can help explain policy processes in nondemocracies. In response, this paper tests key MSF hypotheses in a case study of China’s soil pollution law using qualitative content analysis and a dataset consisting of policy documents, newspaper articles, and secondary literature. Although China’s “cancer villages” received substantial attention in the 2000s and despite a government-mandated extensive survey of the scale and severity of soil pollution in 2010, the country’s first soil pollution law was only passed in 2018. This is surprising given that many other environmental laws were passed a decade earlier, indicating that there was political will to address environmental issues at that time. The case study examines these contrasting developments and identifies the driving forces behind the legislative process. This study is amongst the first to test MSF hypotheses in the context of China in a systematic way. It deepens our understanding of policy making processes in nondemocracies while contributing to MSF theory development.