Political Opportunity Structure:a Key Factor Impacting Public Participation In Governmental Environmental Decision Making In P.R.China

The Chinese government has paid more and more attention to the ever-increasingly serious environmental problems by gradually putting it into governmental policy agendas. Public participation, as an effective way to alleviate environmental pollutions, has played an important role in promoting environmental protection. In recent years, the public has begun to invole themselves in governmental environmental decision making and has impacted the decision making process, which makes the governmental decisions more environment friendly.There are many restricting factors influencing public participation in the People’s Republic of China. First of all, China is still a so-called authoritarian state by some researchers, in which citizen’s participation right is partly restricted. Secondly, the people’s congress system has been divorced from the representative democracy system which bases it itself on election. There are no true elections in China, thus making public participation develop without the protection of representative democracy. Thirdly, the scientific literacy level of the Chinese public is still low while the environmental decision making process involves many science and technology concerns. This makes the public unable to participate. The three above factors has limited public participaiton level. However, the booming public participation practice in environmental policy sphere has made a contrast, which can be called a paradox in Chinese public participation. On the one hand, the public can not participate under the former circumstances, on the other hand, the public actually participate and have an impact on the decision making process.The emergence of this paradox is due to the effect of political opportunity structure. The author borrows the western political opportunity structure theory and tries to make it locally suitable to analyze Chinese public participation pheonemon. In this dissertation, the political opportunities of public participation in governmental environmental decision making are defined as ruling party’s governing philosophy, openness of political institutions and distribution of power in government. For the first political opportunity, it can be measured by Chinese communist party’s philosophy about democracy and development. For the second political opportunity, it can be measured by laws and policies formulated and implemented by government to promote governmental information disclosure, to facilitate public participation in environmental decision making, to deregulate the mass media and to foster non-governmental environmental protection organizations. For the last political opportunity, it can be measured by the historical change of administrative level of central government environmental protection body.The author uses multi linear regression method to analyze the relationship between public participation in governmental environmental decision making as depedent variable and other independent variables, including environmental pollution level, education level, socio-economic level, political opportunity structure and so on. The author discovers that political opportunity structure is the most important factor impacting public participation in environmental decision making in China, compared to the other factors. Then, the author investigates the historical evolution of the defined political opportunities and analyzes their impacting mechanisms.The political opportunities are interacted. Every single political opportunity has limited effects. Only the self-reinforcing political opportunity structure comprised of the interacting political opportunities can open the door for public participation in governmental environmental decision making. Therefore, the Chinese government should create more political opportunities in order to make a stronger political opportunity structure.There are three creative points in this dissertation. First, the author localizes the western political opportunity structure theory and defines the political opportunities and their indice suitable to study public participation in environmental decision making in China. Second, the author tests and verifies that political opportunity structure is the dominant factor impacting public participation in environmental decision making process, which questions the basic assumption underlied the science popularization theory. Third, the author studies the historical change of every single political opportunity and their effects on public participation in governmental environmental decision making process.