The Legal Approach Toward The Environmental Management Innovation

To a great extent the environmental problems are the problems of environmentalmanagement, and the bad environmental management will aggravate theenvironmental pollution and destruction. Since the1970s, severe economic and socialcrisis came to the front of governments, so they reflected on the governance approachto the society. Then many governments in the world set off a wave of administrativereforms characterized by governance reforms, which including the marketability ofgovernment function, the lawfulness of government bodies, the democratization ofgovernment’s decisions and the multi-centers of the exertion of government’s rights.On the governance paradigm, the theory of good governance has great influence,which emphasizes the maximization of social interests and the human collective valuein public affairs. This is a great inspiration to China’s environmental managementinnovation.The environmental management in China has experienced the phase of “control”with strong administrative power, and the phase of “governance” with weakenvironmental right. Now it is moving towards the phase of “good governance” withthe cooperation between administrative management and public participation. Theenvironmental management innovation with the goal of good governance should takethe rule of law, democracy, justice and efficiency as the value evaluation standards.This paper presents a legal approach to the environmental management innovation,that is, to establish an interactive and cooperative relationship between theenvironmental administrative management and the environmental social management.It should change the subject of the environmental management from singularity tomultiplicity, the perspective of the environmental management from one-way totwo-way, and the structure of the environmental management from control to balance.However, the bottleneck of this cooperative relationship is that administrative powersand environmental rights have disparity in position. The civil rights is not strong enough to constrain the abuse of administrative power. The public participationalways turn out to be a mere formality. Therefore, this paper suggests theenvironmental social power is an important means for compensating the shortage ofenvironmental rights in the process of environmental laws construction. Theenvironmental social power has dual functions which are constraining theenvironmental executive powers and protecting the environmental public interest.The environmental social power is generated at the background of "state-society"division, and it means the non-governmental organizations, social groups and citizenscan use social resources to impact the environment-related behavior. The rules of theenvironmental social power differs from the environmental administrative power,especially it needs the social participation as the operating platform. In addition, thepurposes of the environmental social power are promoting fair allocation of theenvironmental benefits, and at this stage it is urgent affairs to restrain the alienation ofenvironmental public interest and support the disadvantaged groups in the distributionof environmental benefits. So the justice of the environmental social power can bemaximized.