Abstract
Environmental monitoring data are essential to informing decision-making processes relevant to the management of the environment. Their accuracy is therefore of extreme importance. The credibility of Chinese environmental data has been long questioned by domestic and foreign observers. This paper explores the potential impact of institutional, political, and ideological factors on the accuracy of China’s environmental monitoring data. It contends that the bureaucratic incentive system, conflicting agency goals, particular interests, and ideological structures constitute potential sources of bias in processes of environmental monitoring in China. The current leadership has acknowledged the issue, implementing new measures to strengthen administrative coordination and reinforce the oversight of the central government over local authorities. However, the failure to address the deeper political roots of the problem and the ambivalence over the desirability of public participation to enhance transparency might jeopardize Beijing’s strive for environmental data accuracy.
Highlights
Environmental monitoring aims to produce evidence that reveals the state of the environment based on continuous, long-term measurements of physical, chemical, and biological variables [2,3]
This paper investigates the institutional, political, and ideological factors affecting the accuracy of environmental monitoring in China
The environmental supervision talks” (EST) mechanism consists of administrative talks held by officials of the Ministry of Environmental Protection (MEP) in localities where concerns have been raised over environmental quality and over the capacity of local authorities to meet environmental standards
Summary
Environmental monitoring aims to produce evidence that reveals the state of the environment based on continuous, long-term measurements of physical, chemical, and biological variables [2,3]. The structure of the official monitoring system has remained largely modelled after the country’s administrative structure, with ministries and their affiliated agencies still providing the bulk of data and reports This reproduces inter- and intra-provincial differences in terms of environmental protection system efficiency, including long-standing issues of lack of trained personnel in poorer regions [20,21]. Investments, and regulatory and organizational progress, the accuracy of Chinese official environmental data is still contested by both domestic and foreign observers This is a by-product of several factors, including the establishment of public disclosure mechanisms, the growth of social media, and the accessibility of third party sources of information. Beijing has committed to implement organizational and administrative measures fighting data manipulation, i.e., the behaviour of not reporting the true pollution level, either by falsifying or hiding pollution data (for a definition of ‘manipulation’, cf. [7], p. 204) as we will discuss further on in this paper, focusing on organizational issues and corruption alone might lead to an oversimplification of the problem, which has deeper political and ideological roots, with wide implications for environmental governance
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