A Study On Rural Environmental Governance In China

No one would against the opinion that economic development must be accompanied by environmental protection, and this consensus has became the ecological civilization construction of the national strategy. The rural environment governance is going on step by step just under the background. With the development of the national rural environment governance like “construction of socialism new countryside”, “construction of beautiful countryside” and “improve rural living environment”, the rural environment governance have achieved substantial progress on the practical level, however, the theory study of the related subject is obviously lagging behind. Aiming at the status quo, two aspects are contains in this paper: on a macro level, the method of quantitative analysis is used to research the development of China’s rural environmental governance stage, policy and its management concept; on a micro level, case on the basis of field investigation and other cases are widely collected, the rich connotation of the rural environmental governance is revealed base on the cases, and try to find the way of optimizing the governance structure.The research of this paper shows that 2005-2006 is the turning point of China’s environmental governance, during which the management of environmental in the rural is becoming more and more important like that in the urban. Since 2005, China’s rural environmental governance shows the characteristics of stage obviously. 2005-2008 is the "top-level design" period of China’s rural environmental governance. Between 2008 and 2010, the comprehensive improvement of rural environment was strengthened unceasingly, and during 2010-2013 the large area improvement became an important gripper. Since 2013, improve rural living environment roles as a new propeller. According to the rural environmental governance practices of last decade, this article give a fundamental distinction between “environmental regulation” and “environmental governance”: the former tend to rely on the intermittent project investment with the characteristics of the temporary, and one-way operation can be realized; while the latter pay attention to the intermittent project investment and the continuity of daily operation equally with the characteristics of sustainability, and the bidirectional interaction is essential.Based on the field investigation, the paper constructs an inclusive analysis framework, which contains four elements of village contradiction、 industrial structure、environment governance and external forces and their interact with each other. As the openness and liquidity of rural social is increasing day by day, differ to the master of economics Ellie Ostrom’s research, we should take the external forces like government, enterprises and social organizations into account in order to enrich the public governance theory. This comprehensive analysis framework will help to break through the existing supply and demand analysis on the public products. Good rural environment is usually regarded as a basic public goods, the supplier is thought to be government agencies, and the consumers are the villagers. In this paper, there are two differences with general supply and demand analysis. On the one hand, the institutional change of the case in this paper illustrates effective supervision is the key of rural environmental governance, and then governance cost can be introduced into supply and demand analysis by the cost of supervision; on the other hand, study on the internal structure of the government and village indicates that inspire the enthusiasm of many participants possible and necessary.The supervisory cost often varies due to the difference of governance content. The comparative analysis shows that the problem of "effective supervision" will become the most serious of all in the waste management which is relatively difficult in daily operation. Considering the large rural areas and the huge number of farmers, rely on external forces simply to solve supervision problem in waste management would be unsustainable because of the high cost of supervision. As the modernization of consumption idea and production, and the increasing scarcity of resources, we have no choice but to find a way of garbage recycling use, of which the garbage classification is the key step. Garbage classification is very important, an its success depends on supervision level in the process of classification. In order to reduce the supervision cost, we must strengthen the construction of the rural social organization and develop rural collective economy. The research of cases in this paper shows that local organizations can reduce the supervision cost in daily supervision. Organizational resources and funding is alternative in a way, a place with abundant organizational resources and fewer money can also achieve good governance. There is no doubt that the development of collective economy is the fundamental way of improving rural social organizations, and it can greatly enhance the motivation of villagers’ participation in environmental governance and reduce the supervision cost by internal supervision.Comparative analysis of the successful cases show that the idea of regarding government as the only supplier of the rural environmental governance is limited and insufficient. First of all, this view ignores the relationship between the coordination degree of internal system and the product supply. Secondly, from the perspective of governance cost, government departments supply the public service would be unsustainable. Just like the classification in the government system, the responsibility system of the rural environment management also be distributed, and both government agencies and others like business, social organizations, villagers and so on. Therefore, we need to break the old idea and establish responsibility system according to the objective of reducing the management cost. The reasonable responsibility distribution system will help to stimulate the participants’ motivation, and enhance the collaboration between each other, improve the benefit of the projects.Analysis of rural environment conflict under the dual structure between urban and rural implies that rural would bear more and more exogenous pollution because of the famous “Not In My Back Yard” and the dual structure. Difficulties caused by the current law, grassroots social changes and the integration of political and business, make farmers in the suffer circle difficult to find a complaint channels, and thus may eventually choose violent protests. We need to help the victims in the rural environment resistance by breeding social environmental group and complementing the details of environmental protection laws and regulations, also we need to constraints and guidance the integration of political and business in order to make economic development more environment friendly.In general, the governance structure of the rural environmental can be analyzed from different dimensions including governance concept, governance content, the relationship between urban and rural and participants. So each dimension provides a way of optimizing the governance structure. According to the theory of Williamson who is the master of institutional economics, the optimization of the governance structure is the fundamental way of improving management effectiveness and reducing the management cost.