Environmental Protection Bureau Leadership at the Provincial Level in China: Examining Diverging Career Backgrounds and Appointment Patterns

Abstract

This paper analyses the career backgrounds of local government officials in provincial Environmental Protection Bureaus (EPBs) in China and explains the appointment patterns of Chinese EPB bureaucrats. Using biographical information of provincial EPB heads and drawing on fieldwork conducted in Shanxi Province and Inner Mongolia, this paper finds that only one-fourth of the provincial EPB heads were promoted through the bureau ranks within the EPBs, while the remaining three-fourths were appointed from positions outside the environment field. Further, nearly all EPB heads' professional backgrounds and associated networks can be clearly categorized as environmental, business, provincial government, or local government oriented. This paper delineates these four types of Chinese EPB leaders and explains why an awareness of the different professional orientations is critical to understanding environmental regulation and protection in China. These findings have implications for inferring the unique characteristics of a province's EPB leadership, the implementation capacities of provincial EPBs, and the appointment preferences of provincial leaders.

Keywords:

• Agency
• environmental protection
• policy implementation
• networks
• leadership
• China

Acknowledgements

The author thanks William Hobbs for his excellent research assistance and Sarah Eaton, Thomas Johnson, Arthur Mol, and Ran Ran for their valuable feedback on the earlier drafts of this paper.

Notes

EPB ‘head’ refers to the EPB Director (juzhang ) or the EPB Party secretary (dangzu shuji ), which are positions almost always held concurrently.

The main role of the EPB is to enforce environmental protection laws by regulating and monitoring pollution in water bodies, air, noise, solid waste, and soil. For a more detailed description of the role of EPBs, see Lee (2006, p. 82).

A comprehensive review of cadre appointment processes is beyond the scope of this paper. For further details on cadre appointments and the role of the Chinese Communist Party's organizational departments, see Manion (1985, 1993), Burns (1987, 1994), and McGregor (2010, pp. 70–103).

Interview, September 2011, Shanxi, county EPB head.

Interview, September 2011, Shanxi, county EPB head.

Interview, September 2011, Shanxi, municipality EPB head.

Interview, September 2011, Shanxi, deputy head of county Organization Department.

The source here is the author's database consisting of biographic information for 124 departmental heads of provincial EPBs, development and reform commissions, economic commissions, and construction bureaus in China's 31 provinces.

For example, Persson and Zhuravskaya (2012, p. 56) show that the average tenure on the job for 755 provincial Party secretaries during 1980 and 2005 was 3.29 years. Kostka and Yu (2012) collected data for 898 Party secretaries at the municipal level and found that while in the 1990s the average tenure time was 4.2 years, the average tenure time dropped to 3.3 years between 2002 and 2011. Landry's work on 2058 municipal mayors in office during 1990–2001 also suggests that tenure times steadily declined from an average of 3.2 years in the 1990s to 2.5 years by 2001 (2008, p. 90).

The three exceptions to the patterns of local political or economic careers are the EPB heads in Jiangsu, Anhui, and Tibet. The Tibet EPB head, the youngest provincial EPB leader, began his government career as the deputy head of the Tibet EPB only three years before being appointed as the EPB head. He was 29 when he left Beijing to do aid work in Tibet in 1998 after spending most of his twenties studying for his Ph.D. in environmental protection and after working briefly at the Beijing Environment Science Institute. His career background was categorized as ‘EPB’. In Anhui, the head of the provincial EPB spent a nearly equal amount of time, over ten years each, in both provincial economic departments and in lower level government positions, but spent slightly more time in provincial economic departments. He was also categorized as ‘economic’. The Jiangsu EPB head held for 6 years the position of a vice secretary (fu mishu ) in the provincial government, but served most of his earlier career in different economic government bureaus. He was categorized as ‘economic’.

See, for example, China Daily (17 July 2006) and Watts and Rameesh (2007).

Interview, July 2010, Shanxi, provincial EPB head.

Interview, July 2010, Shanxi, government official at the provincial EPB.

Interview, July 2010, Shanxi, provincial EPB head.

Interview, July 2010, Shanxi, provincial EPB head.

Interview, July 2010, Shanxi, provincial EPB head.

Interview, September 2010, Inner Mongolia, government officials at the provincial Economic Commission and EPB.

Interview, September 2010, Inner Mongolia, county EPB head.

Interview, September 2010, Inner Mongolia, government official in the Pollution Control Office.