Environmental Reviews and Case Studies: Limitations and Challenges of Provincial Environmental Protection Bureaus in China's Environmental Data Monitoring, Reporting and Verification

Abstract

Although administered from the top-down, China's environmental governance is characterized by decentralization, a feature that has been cited as the cause of poor implementation of policies at the local levels. To address this implementation gap, the central government in China has instituted environmental targets in its evaluation system of local leaders. However, the system of performance evaluation based on statistics and indicators has revealed problems of data and information abnormalities, falsification, and collusion between local officials to hide or misrepresent data. Little academic attention has been paid to sub-national institutions in place for data collection, reporting, and verification in China. This paper seeks to understand how institutions collect and transfer environmental data in China's vertical governance structure, as well as the challenges faced primarily by provincial Environmental Protection Bureaus (EPBs) to shed light on why discrepancies and gaps in environmental data might exist. Using data gathered from semi-structured interviews of environmental protection officials in nine provinces and two municipalities across China, this paper provides an analysis of environmental monitoring, reporting, and verification at primarily the provincial level. The consequences of a complex, decentralized environmental monitoring system in China has meant provincial environmental protection bureaus face a multitude of challenges, including a lack of institutional coordination, weak incentives for environmental performance evaluation, limited autonomy for enforcement, and varied capacity and public demand for improved information.

Acknowledgments

First of all, I'd like to thank all of the environmental protection officials who offered their time and insights for this paper. I'd also like to thank Duan (Mia) Zhang who provided valuable research assistance for this project. Gratitude goes to William Miao, Yiting Wang, and Michael C. Keefrider for their assistance for interview transcription and translation. I am further grateful to colleagues at the Chinese Academy for Environmental Planning (CAEP) who put me in touch with many of the provincial and local EPB, EMC, and environmental planning officials I interviewed for this paper. Genia Kotska of the Frankfurt School and Jeremy Schriefels of Tsinghua University and the U.S. EPA provided advice for the planning of this field work. I'm also grateful to Xuehua Zhang and Aaron Reuben for providing comments on an earlier draft of this paper. I would also like to thank the Switzer Foundation and the PEO Scholars Foundation for providing funding for this research. In addition, I'd like to thank three anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments and suggestions.

Note

Notes

1. According to Liu and Yang (2009), an enterprise or institution can be penalized under four conditions: revising statistics without permission or fabricating statistics; forcing or ordering statistics departments or individuals to revise or make up statistics or refuse to report statistics; retaliation against individuals who refuse to issue false statistics; and retaliation against individuals who report statistics violations.