This study examines the environmental governance in China focusing on the environmental NGOs. The main questions in this work are as followings.
Firstly, what is the critical role of environmental sectors including Beijing's governmental environmenta ...
This study examines the environmental governance in China focusing on the environmental NGOs. The main questions in this work are as followings.
Firstly, what is the critical role of environmental sectors including Beijing's governmental environmental authorities and NGOs in dealing with environmental problems, and in what terms should we define its political position, particularly, in Chinese socialist civil society Secondly, how the process of governance shaping the multi-layered cooperation between the government and civil society proceed to solve serious environmental problems in China, and what are the main influences of the environmental governance in China's political context Thirdly, more importantly, what are the main opportunities and constraints in developing the environmental governance of China and what are the political implications of emerging governance on the democratic change of relationship between state and civil society in China With these questions, it analyses the cooperative mechanisms between society and state in process of setting, enforcing, and monitoring China's environmental agenda and policies from the 'environmental governance' perspective. In addition, this work illuminates how the governmental and civil sectors build and manage a environmental partnership effectively under China's authoritarian political air such as the party-sate system, bureaucratic divisions and socialist path dependency.
To answer these asks, the author examine China's domestic and international environmental networks could be recognized as an 'environmental civil society' of China and several cases for enhancing cooperation among environmental actors and look into closely the factors that make the cooperation work effectively. By such an close analyse, this study draw some political implications on the sate-civil society relations and illuminate the dynamics and prospects of environmental politics in China
In many cases, we can find out several mechanism for the close cooperation between governmental and private sectors in China's environmental governance; agenda setting and policy making, implementing and monitoring, educating and mobilizing the public, advocating environmental policy including its rights, supporting and allying environmental partners, and building a transnational network.
With the close study on the cases, the researcher notice that the growing environmental governance of China has significant implications on the domestic politics in that it may support and invigorate the environmental forces and, thus, could go with the emergence of democratic issues such as the basic civil rights including the right to live and environmental right otherwise ignored among civil society in China. In some aspects, the environmental NGOs in China involves some constraints in relations to Beijing, even though it implies the possibility of good governance system in which the environmental NGOs, as the major initiatives of environmental politics, play leading roles.
It is very meaningful point to recognize that Chinese environmental forces could work with one voice and successfully organize the floating public as an environmental civil society under the restricted political conditions. Considering the natures of environmental issues, more importantly, the growth of civil participation in environmental problems is likely to raise the possibility of being spread toward more sensitive social and political issues like peace, human rights and rights to live. In this context, we can suppose that the development in environmental governance will create and enlarge the space of civil society which has an autonomy from state, in result, it will bring about the change of political relations in China.