Study On Policy Change In The Background Of Environmental Protests Of Contemporary China

With the rapid economic growth, the environmental pollution phenomenon was increased so seriously that resulted in environmental protests have been happening frequently, the transformation of the country faced severe crisis of governance. Towards promoting national governance in the process of modernization, the impact of governmental policy-making decision and government system on environmental protests are becoming more and more obvious. Researchers from different perspectives have done a lot of fruitful works, but few studies brought the results of change in the scope of policy change.The core work of this dissertation is trying to give a causality interpretation with the research question of “Why so many environmental protests are often able to bring change of local policy result?”. “Policy change” means a change in the established policy process,which concepts are whether it is affected by external conditions or internal factors, few policies have been maintained at the original point. On the contrary, the policy are involved in evolution constantly. Therefore, environmental protests brought policy changes in both aspects of policy result and policy system, the former is a typical type of unconventional policy change; latter is a slow process of policy change. To this end, this dissertation developed a three-dimensional analytical framework of “system- mechanism- action”, which difined three situations from the perspective of the government and citizens interactive initiatives:(1) institutional analysis focused primarily on national governance nature as an essence of lack of two-way interaction between government and citizens with respect of environmental protests generated policy change;(2) mechanism analysis focused on both aspects of policy change, former one is that the result of environmental protest changed policy result and latter one is that environmental protest influenced environmental protection system;(3) acting force analysis mainly focused on constructing a benign and sustainability policy change, the former requires to digest environmental protests frequent status quo, the latter requires to explore the transformation strategy of national governance. Corresponding to the three progressive issues, namely institutional presentation, protest mechanism and governance improvement.In the institutional framework of national governance, the source of environmental struggles produced policy change was mainly due to four factors: state corporatism,agent-oriented local developmentalism, cohesive and closed policy system and campaign-style governance. Its roots lie in the lack of interactive initiatives between government and citizens. Environmental protest actions often targeted to local government organs directly at all levels, national governance structures and the existing orders were accepted huge and harsh social impacts. In the mechanism framework of national governance, the phenomenon of environmental struggle generated policy changes mainly was called governmental passive response. “Passive response” is divided into both aspects inclued “policy- making response” and “structural response”. The former is a typical“shocking response” model, latter followed the path of progressive rational institutionalism.. Through establishing “benefit-intention-ability” framework to explain the mechanism of environmental protest generated policy change results; through“Hoffman’s model” to analysis the institutional change process of contemporary China’s environmental policy system. In essence, the “policy- making response” did not only bring substantial changes in public policy-making and policy regime, but also did not takechang of governmental policy style, the policy change is a negative behavior that is largely from the results of technocratic governance. “structural response” mainly reflected changes in the strategic concept of governance, changing administrative level and the naming of environmental agencies, environmental law and policy tools. Environmental protection policy system comes from the enrichment phenomenon and the path-dependence of environmental governance in the view of historical institutionalism that is accordance with the overall national policy changing style consistently.Finally, the acting force with two-way interaction between government and citizen are presented in the behavioural framework of national governance. Firstly depending on constructing a new absorption doctrine to digest environmental protests in order to achieve benign and positive policy changing pattern; secondly depending on following the four transitions that include authoritative governance, hierarchical governance, public policy-making and public governance in order to realize sustainability policy change. The acting force analysis that is built on the basis of mechanism analysis corresponds institutional analysis, so that protest and change will achieve a new balance in the double movement statement, thus promoting the modernization of national governance.