Effectiveness of the technical guideline for Strategic Environmental Assessment within the context of China

Abstract

Since the Environmental Impact Assessment Law of People's Republic of China was enforced in 2002, there has been a rapid development of Strategic Environmental Assessment (SEA) for plans and programs (hereafter as “PEIA”) in China. Six years after the implementation of Technical Guidelines for PEIA (HJ/T130-2003), the promulgation of the Chinese PEIA Regulation (2009) provides opportunities and challenges for the implementation of PEIA. The purpose of this research was to evaluate the guideline effectiveness for future improvements. The research began with conceptual presentation to define and analyze SEA guideline system, based on which a criterion framework was put forward to evaluate the effectiveness from both systematic and specific perspectives. The framework was applied to the evaluation of China's technical guideline system from five aspects (i.e., purposes to develop the guidelines, roles of the guidelines, strategies to develop the guidelines, structures of the system and context in which the system operates). Additionally, performance evaluation of the HJ/T130-2003 was also demonstrated in this paper based on questionnaire survey results from 42 EIA professionals. It was indicated that the guideline serves mainly as a quality control measure for PEIA products, and only a small proportion of experts considered it effective due to its inconsistency with the newly released PEIA Regulation (2009) and poor practicability. We concluded by proposing recommendations on improvement of SEA guideline, including more specific wording of the purposes; top design of the guideline system; transformation to collaborative strategies and revision of detail contents, and advices on development of other forms of technical capacity building, including expanding coverage of methodological research, strengthening environmental education and EIA training system and building EA information system.