EU - Earth System Governance Roundtable, 22 October 2009, Beijing, China
Report by Patrick Schroeder and Sander Chan
1. Introduction
The Earth System Governance Project (ESG), in collaboration with the European Commission Delegation in Beijing, organised the “Roundtable on the Future of Environmental Governance in China: New actors, new mechanisms and global dimensions” on 22 October 2009. The Roundtable was very successful, with the participation of thirty six high-level academics and practitioners in environmental governance in China. The Roundtable was also the promising start of long term collaboration and ESG activities in China. Conceptually, the event built on the theme of global environmental change as a common challenge for China and the World. While
global environmental issues, such as climate change, sustainable energy transitions, and biodiversity protection have become priorities on the global and Chinese policy agendas, many political and institutional options remain to be explored, particularly those which require strong global cooperation. This has been recognized by all stakeholders including policy makers, civil society, private sector and the scientific community. Many initiatives to address these issues are being started. For instance, the European Commission in China is currently setting up an ‘EU-China Environmental Governance Programme’; and the
ESG project, as part of the International Human Dimensions Programme on Global Environmental Change (IHDP), is expanding its international network of prominent research institutions into China. The main objectives of the Roundtable were to explore future collaboration in the field of research, to encourage dialogue and cooperation between all stakeholders and to envisage future pathways for China’s role in global environmental governance. Speakers were invited to specifically address the issues of institutional architecture, new actors an participation. In addition, multiple analytical problems identified in the ESG project (or, 'the five A's'), presented at the Roundtable by Professor Frank Biermann (VU University Amsterdam, Netherlands; Chair of the ESG project) were also addressed: allocation and access, adaptiveness, and accountability. As the presentations and discussions at the Roundtable were closely related to the research agenda outlined in the ESG Science Plan, future collaboration in the framework of the ESG project seems to be a promising way forward.
2. Roundtable presentations - analytical problems and themes in China's environmental governance
The ARCHITECTURE of environmental governance in China featured prominently in several presentations:
Professor Ma Zhong from the School of Environment at Renmin University provided an analysis of the fragmented governance architecture of environmental protection based on the example of the Qixing River in Heilongjiang Province. He enlightened the audience with his innovative recommendations about how to strengthen China's environmental protection administrative system. His recommendations included the clarification of roles and responsibilities of relevant government agencies, particularly the authority of the Ministry of Environmental Protection (MEP) over provincial and lower level Environmental Protection Bureaus (EPBs), the reform and strengthening of environmental laws and even the establishment of a high-level Environmental Policy Office (EPO) placed directly under the State Council.
Professor Jia Wenhua from the China University of Political Science and Law presented an interesting case of Inner Mongolia within the context of multilevel governance and horizontal architectures in China. Based on the case study of Ordos, a town in Inner Mongolia representative of other localities in the region which is suffering from overgrazing, water shortage and threatened by deforestation, several recommendations were put forward to reverse the current cycle of accelerating environmental deterioration. To recover the comparative stability of the grassland ecological system, including desert areas, it is necessary to limit, but not to forbid herding and farming. Furthermore, it is necessary to reduce the scale and speed of industrialisation and urbanisation in the area. Finally, to avoid artificial forest plantation and re-vegetation programmes go wrong, such projects need to be strictly based on the availability of water ecological resources in the region.
Dr Goerild Heggelund, senior climate change advisor at the UNDP China, gave an overview of climate change in China, the current status of Chinese domestic climate policy and the potential role of Strategic Environmental Assessment (SEA) as an instrument for environmental governance, including climate change. The Chinese climate change governance architecture includes a range of different elements, such as the establishment of a National Climate Change Leading Group in June 2006 and setting up a Climate Change Department under the National Development and Reform Commission in October 2008. In terms of policies and programmes, the China White Book on Policies and Actions to Address Climate Change was issued in 2008 and as recently as 2009 China’s provinces have completed compiling provincial climate change programmes. One of the important next steps for China will concern the enhanced enforcement and implementation of a national climate change programme within the next 12th Five Year
Plan. Particular focus will be placed on strengthening capacity on provincial levels to address climate change. One of the recent developments in China's overall environmental governance architecture is the issuance of China’s strategic environmental assessment law (China SEAL) by the State Council on August 17th 2009 titled 'Regulations on Environmental Impact Assessment of Plans and Programs', which took effect as of October 1st 2009.
Ms Zhang Lingyun, researcher at Tsinghua University, presented a comprehensive institutional analysis of China's environmental governance architecture, emphasising the issues of environmental performance assessment criteria of local governments and incentives mechanisms.
The theme of AGENCY featured prominently in the presentations on market-based approaches. Notably Jeff Swartz from Evolution Markets, a global advisory and brokerage services company for coal and environmental markets, including emission allowances and emission reduction credits for greenhouses gases, gave an overview of the current carbon market in China. His recommendation for successful nation-wide emission reductions, not only for China, but for any country, includes four main steps. What is required first is a clear institutional framework which defines which actors need to reduce how much and by when. Secondly, a clear methodology needs to be in place to measure emissions and reductions. Third, a price for emissions needs to be set, and finally the process needs to be streamlined. How the market in China is going to develop, for example through the introduction of a carbon cap, will depend to a large degree on the global climate change architecture. From Jeff Swartz's perspective it seems likely that China will sooner or later introduce a carbon cap through sectoral approach.
Professor Xu Jintao from the College of Environmental Sciences and Engineering at Peking University presented the case of Forest Carbon Management, a new issue for China's forest policymaking, offering large potential emission reductions - but at the same time posing huge challenges for forest regulators. Recently, the forest’s carbon storage function has become a mainstream measure in China with 40 million ha new forests to be planted by 2020. The implications for the forest sector include potentially large investments and a favorable policy, but also challenges for designing a sustainable forest regulation reform. Factors on both supply and demand side, particularly the global voluntary carbon market, will affect the development of China's forest carbon management system. To handle the particularly tricky issue of 'leakage' a range of regulatory issues still need to be resolved and clarified, including national accounting and monitoring systems, a national Logging Quota System, expansion of the Eco Compensation Programme and establishing a Forest Land Reserve System to stabilise the forest market.
A special focus of the Roundtable, concerning AGENCY, was the important role of CIVIL SOCIETY AND NGO participation in environmental governance. International and Chinese researchers and practitioners discussed how civil society organizations in China could further support environmental protection and implementation of environmental
policy in China.
Mr. Huang Haoming, director of the China Association for NGO Cooperation (CANGO), presented CANGO’s environmental work and current issues relating to environmental governance and NGOs in China. Summarising the last decade of development, NGOs in China have increased their capacity, become more professional and established a range
of communication and cooperation channels with many stakeholders. Mr. Huang presented several successful case studies of environmental NGOs, which featured among others the '26 degrees campaign'. The initiative was initially undertaken by NGOs in the year 2004 to raise awareness about the electricity consumption of air conditioning and encourage people not to cool buildings below 26 degrees. This idea was taken up again in 2006 by the State Council requesting all governmental office buildings to follow the 26 degree guidelines. In 2007 the Law for Construction Building to Save Energy was passed and requests the design for air conditioners to follow the recommendations put forward by the 26 degree NGO campaign. Another successful environmental campaign which started in 2008 for the Beijing Olympics, and which will be taken up again for the Shanghai Expo in 2010, is the Green Commuting campaign. Over a fourty-five day period in 2008, CO2 emissions from transport were reduced by approximately 11,000 tonnes. Regarding future outlook on the development of civil society in China, Mr .Huang named
five weaknesses that need to be overcome, namely lack of a clear mission and long-term strategy, lack of operational experience like good governance, lack of transparency, lack of accountability and the low payment for staff in environmental NGOs, which makes it hard to attract professional resources.
Associate Professor Jia Xijin from the School of Public Policy and Management at Tsinghua University presented an overview of the trend towards "Small Government, Big Society" in China. Different kinds and classifications of organisations which are commonly grouped as NGOs were elucidated. There currently are 220,000 Social Organisations (shehui zuzhi), 178,000 Civil Non-Enterprise Units (minban feiqiye danwei) and 1,390 Foundations (zijinhui) registered in China. In this calculation a large number of grassroots Civil Society Organisations (CSOs) are not accounted for as they are registered as companies, recorded at other departments or not registered at all. Many questions and issues concerning civil society development in China are still waiting to be addressed, including legal status and capacity of NGOs, regular participation and advocacy in policy processes, freedom of association and civic consciousness among the Chinese public.
Professor Wang Canfa from the China University of Political Science and Law (CUPL) and director of the Centre for Legal Assistance to Pollution Victims (CLAPV) presented the
work of his NGO which was set up in 1998 and since then has undertaken 135 litigation cases relating to industrial pollution incidents. CLAPV operates nation-wide and aids pollution victims to file lawsuits and pay part of the court and lawyers costs for poor pollution victims. In addition, CLAPV holds training seminars for environmental lawyers, judges and environmental officials to enhance their capacity of handling environmental cases and promoting the implementation of environmental law. Since 2001, 239 lawyers and 170 judges were trained in handling environmental law cases.
ALLOCATION AND ACCESS featured prominently as themes in presentations on China's forestry sector.
Professor Liu Can from the China National Forestry Economics and Development Research Center addressed the impact of six priority forest programmes on rural households' income and poverty reduction. Panel data from randomly selected households and townships were collected and analysed. Uniquely, the analysis also focused on income mobility. The impacts on income mobility varied greatly by priority forest programmes. For instance, the Sloping Cropland Conversion Program (SLCP), the Desertification Combating Program around Beijing and Tianjin (DCBT) and the Shelterbelt Development Program (SBDP) significantly impacted on income mobility. While the impact was insignificant for the Wildlife Conservation and the Nature Reserve Development Program (WCNR), the Industrial Timber Plantation Program (ITPP) and
the Natural Forest Protection Program (NFPP) showed good results. The effect of the WCNR was even negative; households being located closer to forest reserves suffer losses in terms of income mobility, as commercial or self-consumptive use of forests by surrounding households is limited. A key factor for significant impact seems to be the provision of governmental subsidies.
Mr. Hans Buys, co-director of the EU-China Natural Forest Management Programme (NFMP), presented lessons learned from the NFMP, which aims at the improvement of the natural and human environment through sustainable management of natural forests resources in China. The programme consists of several components including community development, information sharing, training and dissemination, project management and institution building. The performance of each of these components varies greatly. As part of NFMP demonstration projects were applied to demonstrate too much, while the scale of them was too large to manage at the household or community levels. While participation seems important, according to the NFMP participatory impact monitoring is complicated due to the fact that baselines are difficult to establish. In practice the interest in participatory processes is questionable. Buys also pointed out the different interests between managers and users will depend on the ownership structures, whether state-owned or collectively owned. The broader institutional uptake of the NMFP was
hindered by the low capacity of forest management bureau participants, changing legal provisions due to tenure reform, lack of resource inventory data and the absence of higher decision making authorities in the process. Pilot projects are not up-scaled when the link between pilots project managers and policymakers is weak.
Next steps ahead:
The ESG project, launched in 2008, is rapidly expanding its network of collaborative institutions and researchers, a necessary move given the global theme of the research project. ESG can only become a truly global project with the extensive collaboration of the Chinese research community. At the same time, the ESG network is a valuable platform to our Chinese counterparts for sharing research results. The analytical problems that are the topic of the research project concern China, as we have seen at the Roundtable on the Future of Environmental Governance in China.
The presentations from the Roundtable covered all analytical problems of the ESG research project. However, the main areas addressed were agency and architecture. This reflects changes in China's domestic environmental governance. Decentralization, the entering stage of non-state actors, such as NGOs, research institutions and private sector have marked a shift in China's environmental governance. In the research area this is shown by the fact that Tsinghua University even has set up a special NGO research center to study the role of NGOs. While civil society, like in most places in the world, is gaining in importance, the influence on China's policy making still seems relatively low, raising the question whether civil society has yet to reach its potential. Architecture has been a long time theme in discussions about environmental governance in China, for instance, while the legal provisions for environmental protection are in place, implementation and enforcement are hampered by horizontal and vertical fragmentation in the institutional architecture. However, there is also evidence of improvement and policy integration; the high priority of climate change in international relations has also implored
China to integrate its policy relating to climate change and establish a National Leading Group on Climate Change, chaired by Premier Wen Jiabao. The ongoing scientific and policy discussion on architecture and agency in China is therefore closely interrelated to the issue of global governance. The analytical issues of agency and architecture in China do not take place in a national vacuum, rather, governance trends in China seem to follow suit to global governance trends. The study of agency and architecture in China can therefore directly contribute to the wealth of knowledge on global governance of the international research community and vice versa.
Less addressed at the Roundtable were the themes of adaptation and accountability and legitimacy. The reason for this maybe the fact that the Roundtable explicitly invited speakers on institutional architecture, new actors and participation, but not on legitimacy
or adaptation. Nonetheless, adaptation and accountability and legitimacy are - and will be - crucial as analytical themes in China's environmental governance. Being among the most vulnerable countries to climate change, suffering the effects of Himalayan and Tibetan Plateau glacier melting, desertification, changing monsoon patterns and sea level rise on the densely populated East coast, China will increasingly adopt a politics of adaptation and the reduction of vulnerability. The increasing participation of private and non-state actors in China's environmental governance raises questions about the accountability of these actors. For instance, Chinese policy makers increasingly rely on scientific analyses to implement a ‘scientific approach to development', effectively empowering the scientific community. Moreover, as new civil society actors increasingly participate in China's environmental governance, it will become important to appraise their role in China's environmental governance. At the global level, the equal representation of China and other developing countries in international settings will become increasingly relevant. These questions have extensively featured in discussions of the Earth System Governance community; and may directly feed into the Chinese debate.
The ESG project also features some crosscutting themes, some of them, for instance the issue of Power, was frequently referred to during the Roundtable discussions. The theme of Norms was particularly relevant in the discussion about the implementation of environmental legalisation, and the different roles of informal and formal rules and norms. Scale was discussed in the context on scaling up and down of solutions and institutions within the Chinese context.
The EU-ESG Roundtable on the Future of Environmental Governance is the start of a long-term collaboration in the framework of Earth System Governance between the Chinese and international research communities. The collaboration will take form of research exchanges, mobility of researchers between the different ESG communities and possibly joint publications, workshops and conferences. For that purpose collaboration has been reinstated and reinvigorated between the China National Committee of IHDP, based at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, and the international IHDP secretariat.
Moreover, two ESG project coordinators for China (Sander Chan and Patrick Schroeder) are facilitating exchanges on the project level. Currently, the ESG project is also setting up strategic collaborations with individual Chinese universities and research institutions.
