The Study Of Environmental Policy System For Development Priority Zones

The Outline of 11th Five-Year Plan for National Economic and Social Development of PRC formulated the task of drawing up Development Priority Zones (DPZs) Planning, dividing the territorial space into four types of DPZs, i.e. development-optimized areas, development-prioritized areas, development-restricted areas, and development-prohibited areas. Its purpose is to co-ordinate planning for the future population distribution, economic distribution, land use and urbanization patterns, based on the resources & environmental carrying capacity, existing development density and future development potential, and gradually form a space development pattern that population, economy, resources & environment are in harmony.The key for implementing the DPZs planning is to adjust and improve relevant policies, which including an important aspect of environmental policy. In present, the environmental policies of our country are not Environment-Priority but Economy-Oriented, not Full Process Control but Ending Treatment. And the policy instruments are mainly Command-and-Control without enough attention for Economic-Incentive instruments and Public Participation. The regional environmental protection concept is established initially, without systematic regional environmental policies. Therefore, in order to promoting the formation of DPZs, the present environmental policy system should be adjusted and improved. The main purpose of this paper is to construct the environmental policy system for DPZs. Based on the literature review, the paper analyzed the defects of the existing environmental policies, and specific requirements of new policy system for DPZs.Then a framework of environmental policy system for the DPZs was constructed, consisting of policy objectives, policy instruments and guarantee measures. For the four kinds of DPZs, respectively, a set of macro goals and concrete objectives of the environmental policies were established, main policy instruments such as environmental admittance, pollution control, ecological compensation and environmental economy policies were proposed, and some guarantee measures including environmental performance assessment, environmental information opening, funding and legal mechanisms were discussed.Thirdly, the key implement points of main policy instruments were analyzed. The core policy instruments of DPZs, including environmental admittance, pollution control, ecological compensation, environmental economy policies and environmental performance assessment, were analyzed respectively, according to the function orientation and development requirement of the four types of DPZs, in order to improve the policy operability. And the paper establishes the policy system not only relatively but also independently in the vertical direction to comply the defects and insufficient.This paper lays a useful groundwork for further environmental policy studies related to the DPZs, and provides a reference to the planning and development of the DPZs in China.