A Study Of Institutional Arrangement For Coastal Water Environmental Management And Its Practice In China

With the continuous development of human activities in the coastal zone,coastal environmental problems,especially the coastal water environment problems,have become increasingly prominent,which have become the bottleneck of sustainable development of the coastal countries.In recent years,China has made marked progress in coastal water environment management,it still has a long way to go to achieve the goals of coastal water environment management as set forth in the"China's National Plan on the Implementation of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development" in 2016.In view of this,on the basis of the analysis and studies of relevant theories,practices and specific cases in the field of coastal water environment management at home and abroad,this paper analyzes and studies the coastal water environment management and its institutional arrangement in China from the perspectives of economics,environment and environmental management.As a result,the author of this paper puts forward the suggestions on strengthening of the coastal water environment management institutional arrangement building through institutional innovation,the implementation of scientific management of coastal water environment,and the acceleration of the realization of China's 2030 coastal water environment management objectives.The author,in Chapter 1,introduces the background and rationale for the research topic selection and the innovativeness of the research descripted in this paper.In Chapter 2,after reviewing the relevant basic theories in the coastal water environment management,the author believes that the coastal water environment management should take the sustainable development of the coastal zone as its basic purpose of the institutional arrangement.Supported by the theory of water resource and environment carrying capacity,the institutional arrangement for the coastal water environment management will be more in line with the natural attributes of the coastal water environment,while the adoption of the integrated coastal management(ICM)approach,the coastal water environment management will help to enhance the ability to identify and address the contradictions encountered in the process of the management.,The environmental econormics theory on the basis of the scarcity of water resource provides incentive mechanism for the stakeholders of the coastal zone.Chapter 3 further analyzes and studies the typical cases of the coastal water environmental management implemented with these basic theories,and discusses the characteristics of each theory and the interrelations among them.The study result shows that the core contents of these theories all have the characteristics of identifying and dealing with the contradictions met during the management process,which coincides with the ICM.The theory of sustainable development of coastal zone is helpful to identify and deal with the contradiction between short-term interests and long-term interests in the process of development and utilization of the coastal water environment.The resource and environment carrying capacity theory aims to address the contradiction between the need of the water resources by the stakeholders and limited supplies of the water resource.Environment economics aims to address the contradiction among stakeholders and contradiction between the individual interests and social interests in the process of development and utilization of coastal water environment.At the same time,each theory has its limitations,for example,the theory of integrated coastal management is mainly based on the government system supply level,and therefore,it would be difficult to be fully implemented in the coastal urban water environmental protection planning and river development planning because of the dynamic nature of the resources and environment carrying capacity,while the theory of environmental economics needs administrative intervention in its application.The author further argues that only those institutional arrangements with"guiding ability","incentive and restraint mechanism" and effective cost control can play an appropriate role in coastal water environmental management.Chapter 4 focuses its analysis on the existing coastal water environment management system and mechanism in China.Combined with Chapter 3,this Chapter divides the current coastal water management system into restrictive mechanism,guidance(incentive)mechanism and voluntary mechanism for further study.The study shows that the current coastal water environment management system has strong binding capacity,but the institutional cost of inter-agency coordination between government departments is rather high.Although some incentive and guidance mechanisms have been built,the ability to guide stakeholders such as enterprises and the public is still insufficient.Based on the above analysis,in Chapter 5,combined with China's ecological civilization strategy,the author further studies the development direction of China's coastal water environment government system,and then gives suggestions on the structure and function of the institutional arrangement of the coastal water environment management,and on the near,medium and long-term tasks of water environment management system construction for the Bohai Rim region as an example.In the last section of Chapter 5,the author studies the significance of the latest China's governmental institutional reform for the coastal water environment management,and holds that,in order to meet the requirements of the governmental institutional reform,the institutional arrangement innovation should be carried out for the coastal water environment management system in three aspects:the credit evaluation system for the environmental protection of coastal enterprises,the judicial system for the management of the water environment,and the system for the restoration of the water environment.In Chapter 6,the author summarizes the study described in this paper,while puts forward the vision to continue this study in two respects.