Public participation in water resources management of Haihe river basin, China: the analysis and evaluation of status quo

Abstract

Effective public participation is the key factor to improve the efficiency of the river basin's water resource management and succeed in its comprehensive management. Anyang and Baoding city as typical urban modules, Qingfeng and Laishui county as rural modules, Boai and Anxin County as eco-sensitive area, in the upper and middle reaches of Haihe River Basin are selected in this paper for the research. Methods such as questionnaire survey, interview with interest groups and expert consultation are adopted to analyze and evaluate the environment awareness of residents in this basin, and the current situation of participation in the water resource management of the river basin (WRMRB) with one ten-thousandth of population as sampling. Residents among different reaches and different modules in Haihe River Basin are compared and evaluated in terms of environment knowledge, information circulation channel, water environment satisfaction, willingness to participate, and actual participation rate, etc. As the results show, the status quo of public participation in water resource management (WRM) is eco-sensitive areas>urban modules>rural modules, and the middle reaches> the upper reaches. The main channels for the public to obtain environment knowledge and information are personal experience and passive acceptance through media publicity; the channels of participation are not smooth, and the actual participation rate is lower than the percentage of the willingness to participate, which means there is a high uncertainty of willingness to participate. The main participation activities which the government carried out are publicity and education. It means that they failed to consider the river basin as a whole, and were unable to communicate smoothly within the upper and lower reaches of the basin and make the corresponding design; meanwhile, the decision-making was weak and the whole-process participation was not in place. The residents of this river basin haven’t formed a set of commonly-accepted values for this basin. Suggestions are made in three aspects: decision-making and whole-process participation; non-governmental environmental protection organizations’ role in promotion; environmental education in schools.