This book details various stages in the introduction, establishment and evolution of China’s environmental management system. By combining a literature review, comparative analysis, and case study, it investigates the environmental management system in several key periods in order to systematically assess the necessary measures and appropriate adjustments the Chinese Government implemented to reconcile the growing conflicts between economic development and resources conservation, in the context of rapid economic growth and economic transformation. Given its scope, the book offers a valuable resource for experts, scholars, and government officials in related fields.
This book details various stages in the introduction, establishment and evolution of China’s environmental management system. By combining a literature review, comparative analysis, and case study, it investigates the environmental management system in several key periods in order to systematically assess the necessary measures and appropriate adjustments the Chinese Government implemented to reconcile the growing conflicts between economic development and resources conservation, in the context of rapid economic growth and economic transformation. Given its scope, the book offers a valuable resource for experts, scholars, and government officials in related fields.
This volume tackles a range of ecological issues caused by rapid urban growth in China and examines the policies meant to protect the environment. It features discussions from leading scholars on current regulations, government decentralization and environmental protection, urban development, industrial air pollution, household greenhouse gas emissions, and transportation systems.
This book looks into the increasing conflict between the demand of economic growth and the already fragile ecological system condition in China. The prolonged urbanization process has escalated the erosion of natural environments and is increasing energy consumption. China’s role as a “world plant” is also demanding more and more resource supply as well as energy consumption. This book argues that to correctly respond to these emerging issues, apart from upgrading industry and improves environmental protection techniques, China needs to establish an “ecological civilization” that provides an ideological basis for the construction of a green low-carbon model of economic growth.
Knowledge and insight in national environmental governance in China is widespread. However, increasingly it has been acknowledged that the major problems in guiding the Chinese economy and society towards sustainability are to be found at the local level. This book illuminates the fast-changing dynamics of local environmental politics in China, a topic only marginally addressed in the literature. In the course of building up an institutional framework for environmental governance over the last decade, local actors have generated a variety of policy innovations and experiments. In large measure these are creative responses to two main challenges associated with translating national environmental policies into local realities. The first such challenge is apolicy implementation gap stemming from the absence of the state capacity necessary to the implementation of environmental measures. The second challenge refers to the need for local non-state actors to engage in environmental management; oftentimes such aparticipation gap contributes to implementation failures. In recent years, we have seen a multitude of initiatives within China at the provincial level and below designed to bridge bothgaps. Hence, the central aim of this book is to assess these experiments and innovations in local environmental politics.This book was originally published as a special issue of the Journal of Environmental Policy and Planning.
Environmental regulation in China is not really different from that in the rest of the world, except that environmental authorities are relatively new and less established. In order to understand why corporate environmental performance has hardly improved despite the existing regulatory framework, empirical research on high-level executives' perceptions of environmental protection is essential. This unique book analyses and interprets Chinese managers' perceptions of environmental management and regulatory enforcement practices in Chinese enterprises. Most importantly, it identifies the bottlenecks to environmental protection in Chinese firms. It includes a detailed analysis of the needs for management training (for example, CEO and executive development and MBA education) in China and presents a roadmap of how they can be met. Finally, it presents two case studies that illustrate how Chinese corporations currently react to a wide range of different environmental challenges, including hardening regulatory pressure, competition and lack of capital. Based on an innovative research project sponsored by the UNESCO/UNDP offices in Beijing and undertaken by the Institute for Management Development (IMD), Lausanne, Switzerland and the Business School of the Academy of Science and Technology (USTC), Hefei, China, Greening Chinese Business provides the first hard empirical evidence of how Chinese managers view environmental protection. Over 300 companies-both state-owned enterprises and SMEs-took part in the research. Key findings includeAround 70% of managers surveyed admit moderate or even heavy environmental impact (this is a subjective assessment without an external benchmark). Furthermore, they indicate that the lack of environmental performance is primarily due to insufficient managerial expertise, capital and employment-related protectionism. Managers hesitate to take necessary action to upgrade technical equipment, because, although decreasing pollution, upgrading would lead to lay-offs that, in turn, would diminish social stability. Since the latter is first priority in China, managers fear loss of their companies'-and, attached to that, their personal-image, which plays a very important role in Chinese culture. Regulative enforcement has been strong enough to put environmental management on the "to do" lists of Chinese managers. Nevertheless, managers criticise existing enforcement practices as being too lax and untransparent (due to local protectionism, bribery and lack of expertise in the enforcement institutions). Managers consider environmental functionaries-the Chinese equivalent of an environmental protection agency-and the government to be the most important environmental stakeholders. This is a clear sign for their predominantly reactive attitude towards environmental protection: few Chinese companies are going beyond compliance and pioneering integrated approaches to pollution prevention. The research shows similarities between current Chinese company approaches and the "state of the art" in industrial centres of OECD countries such as Germany in the 1960s. Apart from a lack of capital, managers cite a lack of expertise-managerial more than technical-as the main obstacle to "greening" their organisations. Environmental management programmes need to be developed: competence-building should start with CEOs and executives. Greening Chinese Business will aid readers to understand how: Chinese managers perceive and react to the increasing (more external than internal) pressure to improve environmental protection; understand the regulatory, public and business environment in which Chinese managers make decisions about environmental protection; understand the potential for improvement of this regulatory, public and business environment, either as a manager or an external stakeholder and develop strategies that lead to improved stakeholder relationships and, consequently, to competitive advantage; understand the urgent need to develop environmental management practices in Chinese companies in areas such as EMSs and supply chain management; and identify the resources available for management development in China.
As the dazzling economic and social changes in China have imposed substantial impact upon the quality of environmental governance, it is time to review the problems and progress in the politics of China''s environmental protection. This book analyzes the factors in China''s governance and political process that affect and restrain its capacity to handle the mounting environmental problems. It argues that solutions to China''s ecological woes to a larger extent lie in the political and institutional changes rather than in engineering, technological and investment input. The book talks about new policies and reform measures in the green area taken by the government since 2007, arguing that some of them may be quite effective in the long run, as long as they alter institutional factors and the OC growth-firstOCO mindset that obstruct the green effort. The book also includes discussion of China''s climate change policy not only because global warming has come under the limelight of the international community in recent years, but also because it offers a unique dimension to analyze the country''s environmental diplomacy and domestic bureaucratic structure on emissions cutting and related energy issues. China is currently at the crossroads of further political and economic reform, and the intensified public attention to environmental pollution may help the Chinese Communist Party to decisively push forward the long-sluggish political reforms.
China is a multiethnic country with a vase territory, a land of diverse ecosystems. With the drive for industrialization in China and the implementation of a western grand development strategy in western regions, both governments and people face great challenges in environmental protection and sustainable use of biodiversity resources as a result of growing interaction between human activities and the natural environment. To meet the challenges, governments in these regions need to adopt a series of important policy measures not only to reduce industrial emissions but also to return farmland to forests and pasture to grasslands and to implement measures of ecological migration to reduce human activities in ecological conservation areas. In this regard, China must not only learn profound lessons from industrialized countries but also search for international cooperation. The United States provides some good comparative case studies on environmental protection, grassroots environmental management, and conservation policies in western regions. This book attempts to address key questions about Chinese and U.S. environmental policies by looking at the historical development of environmental protection and the current environmental policies in the western regions of the two countries. Book jacket.
