Addressing Uncertainty of Environmental Governance in Environmentally Sensitive Areas in Developing Countries: A Precise-Strike and Spatial-Targeting Adaptive Governance Framework

Xiaohui Ding,Pingping Tang,Weizhou Zhong,Chen Zhou

doi:10.3390/su11164510

Abstract

Endowed with distinctive natural ecosystems and abundant biodiversity, regional environmental governance in developing countries, especially the environmentally sensitive areas (ESAs), is facing the daunting task to ultimately divert their regional development mode towards sustainable fashion through governance transition. However, given their less-developed status in particular expressed by under-developed economies, unsound political regimes, low governance capacity, such task seemingly insurmountable. In order to approach the incompatibility between economic development and maintenance of the ecosystem services value, and understand the complex and interlocked nature of the regional institution system of ESAs in developing countries, an ecosystem services value-based adaptive governance model was introduced to identify the deficiencies and failures of existing regional environmental governance and establish innovative arenas and transition agendas for innovating and reframing regional institutions and modifying role of regional actor groups and governance mode in the process of decision making on environmental issues. Such approaches were conducted in a circular diverting process in order to facilitate the mode of regional development transforming towards sustainable development. For demonstration the process of application and effectiveness of this methodology, a case study was conducted in a typical ESAs—the Water Source Area of the Middle Route Project of the South–North Water Diversion Project in China. Through integrating the ecosystem services value (ESV) assessment into a wider framework of institutional change, the regional institution system innovation and reformation was directed by taking the ESV changes and pattern of its geo-distribution in the research area as indicators or clues. Compared with traditional proposals for administrative change, the methodology proposed in this study was not prescriptive or directive: Rather, an approach for influencing the direction and speed of transition through a series of steering and coordination mechanism. Therefore, this model is with the potential to be implemented by local communities in regions, especially ESAs in developing countries, to encounter with similar regional development challenges and complex, interlocking, and over-dated regional institutional system associated with environmental issues.

Highlights

Regions in developing countries endowed with distinctive natural ecosystems and abundant biodiversity are often classified as environmentally sensitive areas (ESAs) by regional or national authorities [1,2]
Despite these semantic efforts, such regions commonly face a ‘regional development dilemma’, and the local governments in these regions are burdened with contradictory mandates: On one hand, they are expected to maintain the functionality and integrity of their ecosystems, yet, on the other hand, they are expected to revitalize the local economy and augment the social and material wellbeing of the local communities
With the adoption of the framework developed in this research, the ESAs in developing countries can assess and identify limits and flaws of their regional environmental governance and facilitate innovation and reformation of regional environmental governance to initiate regional development transformation towards sustainability

Summary

Introduction

Regions in developing countries endowed with distinctive natural ecosystems and abundant biodiversity are often classified as environmentally sensitive areas (ESAs) by regional or national authorities [1,2] Despite these semantic efforts, such regions commonly face a ‘regional development dilemma’, and the local governments in these regions are burdened with contradictory mandates: On one hand, they are expected to maintain the functionality and integrity of their ecosystems (both locally and as part of the wider ecosystems), yet, on the other hand, they are expected to revitalize the local economy and augment the social and material wellbeing of the local communities. In addition to traditionally identified factors that led to this implementation gap in developing countries, which is explained by a lack of technical and financial capacities among young environmental agencies in combination with the low political priority given to environmental aspects [11], the importance of environmental governance is increasingly emphasized [12,13]

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