Environmental participation in the shadow of the Chinese state

Abstract

China’s environmental governance reforms are simultaneously strengthening state enforcement measures and encouraging citizen participation in monitoring and enforcement processes. State control over environmental protection and citizen participation appear to be in tension with each other. In discussing environmental governance under democracies, Börzel and Riesse, however, theorise that opportunities for citizen participation increase as a state increases its enforcement capacity, at least until the state becomes very strong. This article analyses changes in the regulatory field that have strengthened state coercive capacity to enforce environmental law, and two aspects of citizen participation: civil society monitoring of polluters and participation in environmental public interest lawsuits. The early evidence on citizen participation since the revised Environmental Protection Law took effect on 1 January 2015 is mixed. Civil society organisations have been allowed to serve as plaintiffs in a small number of high-profile environmental public interest lawsuits, but that domain remains dominated by state-backed organisations and local procuratorates. Finally, in reaction to the threat of new fines and penalties on illegal emissions, some grassroots civil society organisations are finding new opportunities to advise and monitor polluters.

Keywords:

• China
• environmental governance
• public participation
• public interest litigation
• civil society

Notes

Acknowledgments

The author wishes to thank Chloe Froissart, Benjamin Kyoung Shin, van Rooij, Alex Wang, and an anonymous reviewer from this journal for their comments on earlier versions of this article.

Disclosure statement

The author reports no conflicts of interest. The author alone is responsible for the content and writing of this article.

Funding

This work was supported by a Research Award from the Fulbright Commission in 2014–2015, which allowed the author to conduct research at the Research Institute of Environmental Law at the Law School of Wuhan University, China. The author’s research has been supported by grants from the Fulbright Commission, the Committee for Scholarly Communication with China, the U.S.-Japan Friendship Commission, and the Appalachian College Association.

Permission

Figure 1 and two quotations, with permission of the publishers, from: Börzel, T. A. and Risse, T. (2010), “Governance without a state: can it work?” Regulation & Governance 4: 113–134. doi: 10.1111/j.1748-5991.2010.01076.x.

Notes

1 Wang (2013) shows that local authorities did shut down highly polluting factories when given strict targets as part of campaigns to decrease pollution.

2 Thanks to Alex Wang for pointing out this tendency.

3 Wang (2013) and van Rooij, Stern, and Furst (2014) address the cadre evaluation system, which also is a means to improve enforcement by stiffening the resolve of local officials to enforce environmental regulations. Lo (2015) finds that the cadre evaluation system for energy conservation has been ineffective in changing the behaviour of local officials.

4 In fact, China’s state has periodically raised fines to improve their administrative power over polluters (van Rooij and Lo, 2010, 18), but the number and size of fines rose roughly at the same pace as GDP growth, which undermines the impact of the fines (van Rooij and Lo, 2010, 29).

5 GONGOs are some of the earliest civil society organisations that emerged in China. Until 2014, all civil society organisations that officially and appropriately registered had to find a sponsor that was a state agent in the same functional area, e.g. an environmental civil society organisation could be sponsored by a local EPB. GONGOs differ from this usual sponsorship relationship of civil society organisations in that GONGOs are directly attached to, and started by, state units. For example, the All-China Environmental Federation is attached to the ministry of environmental protection and receives its funding from the ministry. For a discussion of environmental GONGOs in China, see Schwartz (2004), Wilson (2015a), and Wu (2003).

6 Exceptions include Wilson (2015a, 2015b) and Xu and Zhang (2015).

7 Civil society organisations’ standing was ambiguous in the revised Civil Procedure Law (Article 55), which led courts in 2013 and early 2014 to reject all such cases, even from the All China Environmental Federation, the most prominent GONGO working on environmental lawsuits, until passage of the revised Environmental Protection Law.