Dancing in Chains: Policy Influence of Environmental Organizations in China

• In Event: Poster Session: Division 13 Politics of (former) Communist Societies

Abstract

The past four decades have witnessed massive economic and social transformation in China. One consequence is the emergence of numerous social organizations. Existing research of these organizations focuses on state-organization relations. What is less understood is whether and how these organizations articulate the interests of their constituencies and influence public policies, an increasingly important issue given the tremendous cost of environmental deterioration and social inequality of economic development. Environmental organizations are traditionally deemed as the vanguard of emerging Chinese civil society and active policy advocates by many researchers and practitioners. Are these organizations all active in influencing policies? Do they adopt the same mode to influence policies? Are there differences between top-down and bottom-up environmental organizations? Furthermore, political context has become more restrictive for them since the current Party-state leadership came to power in 2013. Have environmental organizations been impacted and changed their behaviors since then? These questions will be addressed in this paper based on most recent information. In addition, this research will provide a clearer picture of policy influence and interest representation of top-down environmental organizations, which remain under-researched in existing literature.
This study is based on intensive fieldwork in China conducted in past years, including interviews, surveys, and collection of other first-hand and second-hand materials. In the author’s previous research of women’s organizations and health organizations in China, an inductive framework has been established to generalize policy influence and interest representation of social organizations. Stemming from and developing two popular analytical models applied in this research field—civil society/pluralism versus state corporatism, this framework consists of three modes of policy (non)influence in the category of top-down organizations— “active state corporatism,” “passive state corporatism,” and “symbolic state corporatism”—and three modes of policy (non)influence in the category of bottom-up organizations— “embedded pluralism,” “critical pluralism,” and “silent pluralism.” Each mode is manifested in three dimensions—policy influence, interest representation, and policy participation. Policy influence has three levels of meaning— willingness, actions, and effectiveness to influence policies. Interest representation is defined as whether an organization reaches out to collect and articulate opinions of its constituencies and tries to influence policies based on these opinions. Policy participation is whether and how an organization participates in the policy process. Regarding top-down organizations, the differentiation of participation lies in power source and policy stages in which an organization participates. For bottom-up organizations, the differentiation of participation consists in their attitudes toward the state and strategies to influence policies. The application of this framework will disclose whether top-down and bottom-up environmental organizations behave in different ways, and whether variations exist in each category. This research collects both historical and current information of organizations, based on which possible behavioral changes and the reasons for these changes will be identified.
The name list of environmental organizations in this research comes from publications of the Ministry of Civil Affairs and All-China Environment Federation, information from the website of China Development Brief, relevant research papers/books, media reports, web portals, and recommendations of organizational leaders or researchers. The resulting database is composed of 50 national-level top-down organizations, 47 bottom-up organizations—seven are alliances of college students’ environmental organizations, and nine websites. A portfolio for each organization has been constructed and updated, including both general information and policy-related information. Some typical organizations will be studied in a more detailed fashion than others, and many organizations sharing certain characteristics will be studied as clusters. For each mode of policy (non)influence identified, at least one case will be presented. In addition to many short case studies, the following cases will be presented and analyzed in detail: All China Environment Federation and the revision of the Environmental Protection Law, Green Earth Volunteers and the Nu River anti-dam activism, Friends of Nature and the battle of the Xiaonanhai hydroelectric power project, and Global Environmental Institute and US-China collaboration on climate change. Finally, the implications of findings of this paper for the prospects of Chinese civil society and political participation, especially in the current context of increasing political pressures, will be discussed.

Author

• Honggang Tan, Syracuse University