Soft law governance of enterprise data compliance in the context of environmental protection

Hongyu Lan

Article ID: 3486
Vol 5, Issue 2, 2025
DOI: https://doi.org/10.54517/jelp3486
Received: 24 March 2025; Accepted: 17 April 2025; Available online: 29 May 2025; Issue release: 30 June 2025


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Abstract

Domestic and foreign countries have different views on soft law governance. In China, the understanding of “soft law” stays at a static level, which is considered to be a social norm in a pluralistic sense. Foreign countries understand “soft law” from a dynamic perspective, that is, they mainly tend to take it as a means of governance and a mechanism to solve disputes and contradictions. Combining the above two viewpoints, soft law governance can be understood as a governance concept or governance model, and it takes the needs of the governance object as the starting point. Moreover, it advocates bottom-up governance. This governance method reflects the value connotation of people-oriented, democratic, autonomous and inclusive, and actively practices “multi-subject participation”. It can be seen that, rather than hard law, soft law is more suitable for the liquidity, development and change characteristics of enterprise data, especially in the context of environmental-related data, and is conducive to condensing the governance force of multiple subjects including the government. The effectiveness of enterprise data compliance governance is of great significance in the field of environmental protection. With the help of ecological environment data such as carbon emission data, environmental detection data and pollution control data, the efficiency and benefit of ecological environment governance can be improved, and the efficiency of ecological governance can be driven by data. But compared with the United States, the European Union and Singapore, the effect of enterprise data compliance soft law governance is not significant. Through literature research and comparative analysis, the factors affecting the effectiveness of Chinese soft law in enterprise data compliance governance are analyzed, and the solutions can be found from the comparative analysis.


Keywords

soft law; enterprise data; sustainable development; environmental data governance; environmental protection


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