TITLE:
Environmental Governance in China
AUTHORS:
G. Venkat Raman
KEYWORDS:
Environmental Governance, Decentralization, Central-Local Relations, State-Society Relations, China
JOURNAL NAME:
Theoretical Economics Letters,
Vol.6 No.3,
June
22,
2016
ABSTRACT: The question of environmental governance has been of significant interest
to the scholarly community in general and sinologists in particular. The
current literature on environmental governance is researched and studied
broadly under four domains, namely, globalization, decentralization, market and
individual based governance, and cross-scale governance. In this paper one has
tried to look into the question of environmental governance in a socialist
market economy like China from the point of view of “decentralization”. The
word “decentralization” here is to be understood in terms of a) central-local
relations and b) state-society relations. The paper discusses some of the
critical aspects related to these two facts of environmental governance by
referring to existing literature in the field of domestic governance and
politics in China. Further, the paper discusses some of the measures undertaken
in China to tackle the question of environmental governance. The question of
environmental governance is currently undergoing a phase of transition with new
forms of “collaborative governance” and new forms of “public private
partnerships”. However, what one gets to see that an apparently authoritarian
China has demonstrated remarkable “political capacity” to constantly reinvent
itself and been open to the idea of engaging the other stakeholders in tackling
the problem of environmental governance.