Dilemmas of State-Led Environmental Conservation in China: Environmental Target Enforcement and Public Participation in Minqin County

ABSTRACT

This paper examines the acute socioecological crisis in the Minqin region of China’s Gansu province beginning in the 1980s and the multilevel, governmental response to that crisis in the first two decades of the 21st century. Drawing on extensive field research and interviews in the area, supplemented by analysis of available data, the paper presents a detailed case study of the development and implementation of the Shiyang River Watershed Restoration Plan in the period 2007–15. The case illustrates how conflicting policy objectives of the central state-led conservation project shaped patterns of interaction between local government officials, cadres, and farmers in Minqin County as well as ensuing outcomes and challenges in policy implementation. The study finds that top-level declaration of ecological and social issues in the watershed as a national security issue incentivized local government officials and cadres to overlook the Plan’s provision for local consultation, in favor of meeting binding ecological and economic targets. It contributes to scholarship on environmental authoritarianism, illuminating structural factors and institutional constraints that shape local government officials’ and cadres’ behavior in a centrally administered environmental policy context.

KEYWORDS:

• Desertification
• environmental governance
• greenhouse horticulture
• integrated water resource management
• Shiyang River
• watershed restoration

Acknowledgment

The authors would like to thank the special editors and the anonymous reviewers of the article for providing valuable and constructive comments.

Notes

Approximately USD 715.55 million.

Approximately USD 1,500.

Approximately USD 750–1,500.

The administrative village (xing zheng cun) is the fundamental organizational unit in rural China. In Minqin, the administrative village committees and secretaries are responsible for implementing policy objectives passed down from the townships/towns and collecting water fees from 5 to 8 “natural villages” (zi ran cun) which, by contrast, exist spontaneously within rural areas.