Participatory Environmental Governance Research Articles

Pulp and participation: Assessing the legitimacy of participatory environmental governance in Umkomaas, South Africa

The Sappi Saiccor mill in Umkomaas, KwaZulu Natal (KZN) Province, is a global pulp producer. It is also a major emitter of noxious substances in the heavily polluted and historically marginalised South Durban area. Taking a qualitative, narrative approach, this paper examines Saiccor's legacy of contamination, community opposition to the mill, and responses of state actors responsible for governing industrial risk. Through a conceptual framework combining theories around participatory environmental governance, legitimacy and state capture, the article explores the extent to which measures deployed by/on behalf of the Sappi Saiccor mill to engage with local residents and activists can be considered legitimate. The paper argues that prevalent corporate instrumentalism and a lack of political will continue to undermine the legitimacy of community engagement processes, which remain characterised by mistrust. It concludes the South African state cannot be relied upon to support genuinely inclusive, deliberative, empowering and reflexive governance practices. It is therefore left to organised civil society to force discourse beyond hegemonic, ecologically-modernised, technocentric ideals, and to bring issues of power, agency, and social justice to the fore of public and policy debate. The way might then be paved for strong political leadership committed to transparent, equitable environmental governance processes.

The relationship between public participation in environmental governance and corporations’ environmental violations

We explore the relationship in China between public participation in environmental governance and corporations’ environmental violations. We do so by collecting data on unlisted corporations’ environmental violations from 2012 to 2015 and manually matching these data with the number of environment-related proposals made by People's Congress deputies of different provinces. We find that public participation in environmental governance significantly decreases the number of environmental violations by corporations. We use the Eco-environmental Credit Policy as a policy shock in a difference-in-differences regression to confirm our finding. We conclude that public participation in environmental governance increases the number of local environmental regulations and thus restrains environmental violations by corporations.

Is environmental tax legislation effective for pollution abatement in emerging economies? Evidence from China

This study estimates the effect of environmental tax legislation on air pollution, using the implementation of China’s Environmental Protection Tax Law (EPTL) as a quasi-natural experiment. For cities which have been authorized to raise tax rates by the EPTL, the air quality index (AQI) is 2.36 lower after the reform. The effect is reinforced in cities with stricter tax enforcement, lower fiscal stress, as well as higher initial pollution levels. Heterogeneity analyses show that the reform is more effective in cities with lower levels of marketization and legalization, as well as in developed cities. In addition, the impact of the reform is more significant in cities with higher levels of public participation in environmental governance, higher tax competition levels, and higher share of secondary industry. A series of robustness tests corroborates the results. This paper provides evidence that environmental tax legislation is efficacious in pollution abatement for developing economies.

Women Participation in the Fight for Climate Justice: India’s Future

UN’s SDG No. 5 provides for achieving women’s equality and empowers them. However, achieving this goal has been a dream. This is primarily because discrimination against females in India has been practiced since birth and continues at every level. Hence, the present study focuses on the international obligation laid down for each nation to ensure gender justice at every level of environmental governance. The article analyzes various provisions enunciated in various international and national instruments. The author concludes that women’s participation in environmental governance should not be merely something that is only mentioned in the policy documents but should also be achieved. This is being done with the help of participatory environmental governance and the inclusion of women at every decision-making level.

A Study on the Impact of Organizing Environmental Awareness and Education on the Performance of Environmental Governance in China.

The advancement of technology and economic development has raised the standard of living and at the same time brought a greater burden to the environment. Environmental governance has become a common concern around the world, and although China’s environmental governance has achieved some success, it is still a long way from the ultimate goal. This paper empirically analyzes the impact of environmental publicity and education on environmental governance performance, using public participation as a mediator. The results show that: the direct effect of environmental publicity and education on environmental governance performance is not significant; environmental publicity and education have a significant positive effect on public participation; public participation significantly contributes to environmental governance performance; public participation shows a good mediating effect between environmental publicity and education and environmental governance performance. The government should adopt diversified environmental protection publicity and education in future environmental governance, and vigorously promote public participation in environmental governance so that the goal of environmental governance can be fundamentally accomplished by all people.

Government responsive selectivity and public limited mediation role in air pollution governance: Evidence from large scale text data content mining

Social media has been widely discussed as an informal way for the public to present their environmental appeals. However, evidence on whether and how the government's decision-making will take the public in the non-Western electoral system under consideration remains limited. In this study, we extracted 9.25 million haze-related posts from Sina Weibo and analyzed the topics using the latent Dirichlet allocation topic model. Furthermore, we provide evidence of the Chinese governments’ responsiveness and the role of online public participation in environmental governance. The results show that the Chinese government responds to the public, both online and offline. Specifically, when online public appeal increases by 1%, the local government's posts on social media increase by 0.347%, and investment and regulations increase by 0.0676% and 0.074%, respectively, in the next phase. However, there are selective characteristics of government response: the local government is more concerned about its “political achievements” than undertaking “governance responsibility.” Furthermore, online public participation plays a minor role in the implementation of regulations.

Influence mechanisms of the National Pollution Source Census on public participation and environmental consciousness in China

The National Pollution Source Census has been conducted in China to strengthen environmental supervision and management while mobilizing the public to participate in census work. Public participation usually plays an important role in environmental governance, but its development in China is relatively inadequate at present. However, the implementation of the National Pollution Source Census has created favorable conditions for promoting public participation. To explore the influence of the National Pollution Source Census on public participation, we conducted a nationwide questionnaire-based survey, recording the public's perceptions and behaviors related to environmental issues following the census. Structural equation modeling and logistic regression were conducted to analyze the data. The main findings indicate the following. First, the implementation of the National Pollution Source Census has had a strong positive impact on environmental consciousness, which, in turn, has had a positive effect on public participation. Environmental consciousness plays a fully mediating role in the relationship between the implementation of the National Pollution Source Census and public participation. Second, among the measurement indicators of the implementation of the National Pollution Source Census, environmental information disclosure, the extent of the popularization of environmental pollution knowledge, media-based publicizing of the significance of pollution source censuses, and the legislation-driven establishment of channels for public participation have a significant positive impact on environmental consciousness and public participation. Third, demographic characteristics such as the age and income of the public further affect their environmental consciousness and participation in environmental governance activities. • Implementing the NPSC strongly improves public's environmental consciousness (EC). • EC positively affects public participation (PP) in environmental governance. • China's NPSC has a strong positive impact on PP via EC's mediating effect. • Info disclosure promotes public EC and motivates PP in environmental governance. • Public's age and income significantly affect their EC and PP in environmental governance.

Incorporating spatial effects to assess the impact of public participation in environmental governance on PM2.5 pollution reduction: evidence from China

Incorporating spatial effects to assess the impact of public participation in environmental governance on PM2.5 pollution reduction: evidence from China

Environmental information disclosure and public choice decisions for urban river restoration: A comparative study between Brussels (Belgium) and Guangzhou (China)

Worldwide environmental information disclosure (EID) has been widely promoted as a policy approach to establish transparent governments, enhance public environmental awareness, and foster participatory environmental governance. While information disclosure and transparency are inherently incentivised within democratic regimes, how and through what pathways an increased flow of environmental information in the absence of democracy could lead to favourable public support for environmental/ecological projects remain under-investigated. Particularly, there exists very limited literature which compares how EID is associated with public environmental choices between different sociopolitical contexts. Taking Brussels (Belgium) and Guangzhou (China) as a comparative case, this study examines the association between citizens' perceived trustworthiness of various environmental information sources and their choice decisions regarding urban river restoration initiatives in contrasting socialpolitical contexts. Latent class modelling of two paralleled discrete choice experiments unveils a consistent classification of three distinctive groups for each city and also the combined sample, including Enthusiastic Supporters (Class 1, who are cost-insensitive and supportive of all proposed changes), Pragmatic Supporters (Class 2, who are cost-sensitive, prefer some changes they favour), and Non-Supporters (Class 3, who are unwilling to support the proposed initiatives). Incorporating respondents' trustworthiness in information sources as covariates in class membership likelihood function, respondents' membership is found to be associated solely with the most trusted information source, i.e., social contacts in Guangzhou, third parties in Brussels, and social contacts for the whole sample. Holding trust toward the most-trusted information source can increase the probability of being a member of Class 1, otherwise, more likely being a member of Class 3. Taken together with the insignificance of the variable denoting a respondent's city in explaining class membership, this study reveals that the variations in the EID levels (matured vs. emerging) and sociopolitical contexts (democratic vs. non-democratic) cannot significantly shape citizens' environmental decisions. Instead, it is respondents' perceived trustworthiness of information outlets that plays a positive role in their supportive decisions. These analytical results offer new insights about the role of EID in environmental governance and call for instilling institutional trust in China and relational trust in Belgium for facilitating effective communication and pro-environmental behaviours across the whole community.

Data Usability: The Forgotten Segment of Environmental Data Workflows

While there has been a rapid increase in the use of participatory science methods over the last decade, the usability of resulting data in addressing situations of environmental injustice is often overlooked, neglected, or used as political fuel for ignoring inconvenient truths. The inability of data to be used for policy, regulation, and enforcement impedes its usefulness in various situations depending on user requirements and governance scales. On the other hand, there are vast open datasets that could be useful for communities and researchers, but these data are often difficult to find, use, or repurpose, beyond their original intent. This article unpacks the data usability problem at the frontier of environmental governance and decision-making, suggesting that by prioritizing environmental data as a public good, there are clear mechanisms for ensuring data usability toward participatory environmental governance. The authors are interested in uncovering the policies and behavioral and bureaucratic patterns that have remained static as participatory science methods and tools have advanced. It is necessary to understand where and when associated tools, methods, and platforms have failed to ensure that data is usable and useful for communities attempting deeper engagement and representation in environmental governance.

The value of social media tool for monitoring and evaluating environment policy communication: a case study of the 'Zero-waste City' initiative in China.

The construction of a ‘zero-waste city’ is a flagship policy to accelerate the development of a green, low-carbon circular economy system in China. Enhancing social participation is an important dimension to evaluate the effect of ‘zero-waste city’ policy construction and an effective way to promote the full achievement of correct waste classification, management, and supervision of solid waste. Based on policy communication theory, this paper aims to take advantage of social media to quantitatively measure the environment policy communication effect and provide a comprehensive panoramic measurement from dynamic characteristics and trend, communication scope, attributes of communicators, and contents dimensions. Based on post data related to ‘zero-waste city’ on Weibo platforms from June 2018 to November 2020, this paper innovatively constructs a measurement system of environmental policy communication that combines social media data with social network analysis and text topic analysis. Results show that from the angle of communication trend, a ‘zero-waste city’ public environment policy is continuously promoted on social media with an increasingly growing volume and is a subject of wide concern for the public. This study confirms the value of social media data in assessing environment policy communication effect and presents several policy implications: Government departments should strengthen environmental policy communication by using Weibo and other social media tools to improve the public’s attention toward the policy and increase their participation in environmental governance; focus on people’s livelihood interest in policy communication content; strengthen the interaction of the public with the content of policies by using a popular and understandable public discourse system and encourage multiple social subjects to participate in policy communication and strengthen the communication of the ‘zero-waste’ cultural concept.

Petro-Security State Power and the Imaginaries of Extremism: An Analysis of U.S. Critical Infrastructure Trespass Bills Targeting Anti-Pipeline Advocacy Movements

Petrochemical pipelines have taken center stage in public debates about the impacts of resource extraction dependencies and calls for greater participation in environmental governance. However, these concerns can run counter to the interests of the petrochemical industry and state security imaginaries that frame critics as threats. These imaginaries are evident in a suite of critical infrastructure (CI) trespass bills introduced by U.S. state legislatures implicating the activities of anti-pipeline protest movements. In a comparative analysis of 51 CI trespass bills, we find significant patterns in how criminal activities are defined across bills, as well as how individuals, aiding organizations, and the tactical practices of activists are positioned as threats. Additional findings show that CI trespass bills are more likely to emerge from states with heavy investments in pipeline infrastructure, states with contested pipelines, and states dominated by conservative political parties. Finally, we illustrate how major components of bills are authored by the American Legislative Exchange Council, a group that supports the interests of petrochemical companies. We argue that, by broadly designating those who resist pipelines as threats, trespass bills serve to strengthen petro-security state powers, thus transforming sites of resistance to petrochemical development into sites of acceptable risk for the externalities of free market industrialism under the pretense of protecting national security. We suggest that these developments may have multiple negative effects, including eroding the public's right to question pipelines and exacerbating patterns of social injustice, as well as unintended positive effects in strengthening organized resistance.

Social Network, Sense of Responsibility, and Resident Participation in China's Rural Environmental Governance.

Based on a survey of 2343 rural residents in China, this paper adopts a binary logistic regression model as the analytical tool to study the impact of rural residents’ social network and sense of responsibility regarding their participation in environmental governance. The results show that the cost, frequency and scope of social network activities have positive and significant influences on resident participation in rural environmental governance. The cost of a social network is conducive to building a rural social network, enhancing the connection of interests and promoting the formation of a rural community. Extending social network objectives from family members to villagers can improve the cultural identity and emotional identity of rural residents. The increase in the frequency of social network activities can not only enhance trust among residents, but also reduce the cost of environmental governance mobilization. The scope of a social network acts as an inhibitor whereby social interaction beyond the scope of rural areas will reduce identification with rural emotions. The four dimensions, including responsibility cognition, responsibility will, responsibility emotion and responsibility behavior have significant influences on resident participation in rural environmental governance. Residents’ sense of responsibility plays the role of an introverted driving force for them to take part in rural environmental governance, which itself helps to overcome “non-participation” behaviors of “rational smallholders” to a certain extent. Furthermore, it endows rural environmental governance with resilience. So, it is of significance to enhance rural residents’ social networks and to improve rural residents’ cognition of collective responsibility.

Empirical Analysis of Political Participation, Government Response and Environmental Governance Satisfaction Based on CGSS2015 Data

Since the reform and opening up, China's economy has grown by leaps and bounds, and many significant achievements have been made in just over forty years. However, rapid economic growth has also brought about serious resource consumption and environmental pollution, especially represented by water and air pollution. At present, the overall strategy of sustainable development and ecological civilisation requires environmental governance to be a public task that must be addressed, and ecological governance is an integral part of the modernisation of governance systems and capabilities. The report of the 19th National Congress points out that "the strictest ecological and environmental protection system in history will be built, and more attention will be paid to guiding the public to play an effective role in environmental governance. Establish an environmental governance system in which the government is the leader, enterprises are the main body, and social organisations and the public participate." It is clear from this that environmental governance is a systematic project that needs to be shared between the government and the public. This paper investigates the relationship between government satisfaction with environmental governance, government responsiveness and citizens' political participation to explore the impact of government responsiveness and political participation on satisfaction with environmental governance, as well as the impact of government responsiveness on citizens' participation in environmental governance.

How can public participation improve environmental governance in China? A policy simulation approach with multi-player evolutionary game

This study explores how public participation can help reshape environmental governance in China. As China is committed to constructing an ecological civilization, a new participatory mechanism has become necessary for promoting environmental democracy. A non-cooperative tripartite evolutionary game is employed to model the dynamic strategy interactions among local governments, polluting enterprises, and the public for participatory governance. A new mechanism design for public participation is proposed to accomplish cooperative evolutionary equilibrium. Simulations show that with adequate support, public monitoring and activism can help release local governments' supervision burden while still being able to reach the desired outcome. Public participation benefits cooperative equilibrium by reducing governance costs and improving policy flexibility, especially when long-term aspirations of reputational effects and environmental tax reform are embraced. Strong support and ensured independence are crucial for unleashing the full power of public participation in environmental governance. From a methodology perspective, policy simulation in an evolutionary game framework represents a novel addition to the research toolbox for policy studies.

Climate change, neoauthoritarianism, necropolitics, and state failure: the Duterte regime in the Philippines

ABSTRACT The Philippines is vulnerable to climate change and the natural hazards it has enhanced. The Philippines lacks peace, suffers from weak state institutions, and is a fragile state. Since 2016 President Rodrigo Duterte has embarked upon a war on drugs, claiming thousands of lives. This war on drugs is perceived to be a pretext for the establishment of an authoritarian government. The confluence of weak state institutions, a disregard for human rights, and weak public participation in environmental governance generates difficulty for coping with climate change in the Philippines. The intersection of climate change and state weakness is found in the violation of the human rights of environmentalists and the Philippines is among the leading countries in the world in terms of the number of environmentalists killed.

Benefits and costs of campaign-style environmental implementation: evidence from China's central environmental protection inspection system.

Campaign-style environmental implementation (CEI) is widely exerted in environmental protection, while its benefits and costs are controversial. We take advantage of the Central Environmental Protection Inspection (CEPI) System-a latest and distinguished form of CEI launched by China in 2016, as a quasi-natural experiment, to compare the benefits and costs of CEI based on water pollution effect estimates. Our results based on the annual panel data from 500 cities during 2009-2018 show that CEPI significantly reduced water pollution by an average of 20.7%. Further cost-benefit analysis based on the estimates of water pollution reduction shows that the potential health benefits of mortality and morbidity reduction resulting from CEPI are at least $12.26 billion, without bearing additional economic costs. We also explore why CEPI is cost-effective and find that CEPI reduces water pollution and becomes cost-effective mainly through deterring local officials, punishing polluting enterprises, and increasing public participation in environmental governance.

Research on Citizen Participation in Government Ecological Environment Governance Based on the Research Perspective of "Dual Carbon Target".

As the people's demand for a better life is getting higher and higher, citizens' requirements for the rural ecological environment are also constantly improving. At present, the deterioration of many rural environments and the cross-flow of sewage have brought great challenges to the governance of the rural ecological environment. Therefore, the improvement in the ability and level of rural ecological environment governance is the key to winning the battle of rural ecological environment governance, and the participation of citizens in rural ecological environment governance is even more crucial to the improvement in the ability and level of rural ecological environment governance. At present, academic achievements on rural ecological environment governance are increasingly enriched, but there are few academic achievements on rural ecological environment governance from the perspective of citizen participation. Since public participation in ecological environment governance is still in the initial stage of development, there are many factors that affect the effective implementation and development of public participation in the ecological environment. For example, various factors such as the imperfect legal system related to citizens' participation in rural ecological environment governance, weak awareness of citizen participation, and difficulty in determining the methods of citizen participation seriously hinder citizens' participation. Improve the theme awareness and ability of citizens to participate in ecological environment governance and to improve the citizen participation mechanism in my country's rural ecological environment governance. By analyzing and discussing the problems and countermeasures of public participation in environmental governance in my country, it is of positive significance to promote citizens' participation in ecological environmental governance.

Leveraging Indigenous Knowledge for Effective Environmental Governance in West Africa

Effective environmental governance is key to achieving Sustainable Development Goals. Environmental sustainability programs in developing countries across West Africa are anchored on western scientific knowledge. This has led to a tendency to marginalize the application of indigenous knowledge in environmental protection in West Africa. Yet, no knowledge system develops in isolation as they cross-fertilize and benefit from each other. Indigenous knowledge systems are as old as the traditional societies having been passed from one generation to another. They are those voluminous, diverse, and highly localized sources of wisdom that are neither specific nor universal. Indigenous knowledge systems such as using animal dung as manure, sighting of the new moon before planting, rain-making rituals, and planting of trees to serve as shades have helped to conserve the wetlands and the forests of most societies in West Africa and are effective in promoting environmental sustainability. Hence, the reason they are considered as important as scientific knowledge which must be integrated through multiple evidence base approaches for effective environmental governance. This article using doctrinal research methodology aims at examining how traditional societies in West Africa can leverage indigenous knowledge to achieve effective environmental governance, mitigate climate change, and promote sustainable development. The article recommends that mainstreaming indigenous knowledge systems into environmental legislation, policy and institutional frameworks will not only help in mitigating environmental issues such as climate change but will help developing countries in West Africa meet the SDG goals and their commitments in the Paris Agreement. The article concludes that the integration of such unique knowledge systems into other evidence or scientific based knowledge systems could be one of the best ways to ensure effective and participatory environmental governance in West Africa.

Building Capacity for Action-Oriented Research in Arizona’s Helium Extraction Boom

Northeast Arizona’s Holbrook Basin is an epicenter in the rush to secure new helium deposits in the U.S. While the helium boom has revealed unease amongst residents, significant knowledge and procedural gaps have prevented the public from making sense of the industry and its potential impacts. These gaps are produced by the opacity of critical minerals extraction, long-term regulatory neglect, and lack of commitments to public participation in environmental governance. However, we suggest that engaged STS scholarship can meaningfully assist at-risk communities in navigating these complexities. This is illustrated in a series of workshops developed by STS researchers and residents for the purpose of building local capacity for independent research and knowledge production. We detail the mutual affordances of these workshops and offer a potentially replicable framework: The Capabilities Model for Social Learning in Engaged STS. We conclude by arguing that this model is a useful lens for examining how STS critical thinking can be leveraged in collaborative research to pursue long-term social change.