The Research Of The Social Capital Of The Environmental NGOs In The Social Event

In late half year of 2003, there was a controversy in the southwest of China, around whether a dam should be built on the Nujiang River or not. The controversy even drew the attention of the central government and was called "The Nujiang Defending War"by the media. In this nonviolent war, the NGOs, such as China GEV (Green Earth Volunteer Association) and Green Watershed of Yunnan, called on various forces, made good use of the public voice and media, and at last shelved the Nujiang dam building plan, which was a dramatic victory of NGOs. Being interested and knowing GEV well for a long time, a nonprofit organization having not registered in government and having only three formal members, the author was curious about how it successfully called on the support of the public and international organizations to impact and even to change the decision-making of the government. With the curiosity and rational thinking, this paper is trying to make some academic retrieve and analysis to explain the behavior of the GEV in the Nujiang defending war. In the discussion of environmental protecting movement, Tong Yanqi, from politics department of Utah University, mentioned, it is impossible to call on and maintain a social movement without proper organization resource。The author mainly used the conception of "social capital"to do a research on the NGOs. According to this conception, the social capital could be mainly seen as two parts, the social network and the value of trust or reciprocity. This dissertation will analyze these two parts of the environmental NGOs'social capital, based on the review of relative theories and methodology. Via measuring some variables, such as the organization standard, network standard, the formality of the network, and trust degree, the paper pointed that, GEV members had obvious characteristics of the new era, and because of having hundreds of volunteers, the bias of the network of the organization was difficult to measure. The more and more people especially who work in the mass media filed take part in GEV as volunteers and become the major 'social capital'. Although do not have formal administration and regulation, GEV has a high degree of inner faith and reciprocity. After the description of GEV's social capital, this dissertation will make a further analysis of the influential factors on the social capital, such as the legitimacy of the organization, the leader character, and the organization cohesion. The analysis on legitimacy suggests that, GEV has a public legitimacy in sociology -being accepted by the commonalty but without legitimacy in law-formal registered in government. However, it does not affect GEV to accumulate and use the social capital. The leader's distinctive personal character attracts the volunteers, which was an obvious characteristic of a lot environment NGOs. So it seems that GEV was a incompact organization, actually it is flexible and easily to use various resources to achieve the objective. All of above will be discussed in the 4th chapter. The 5th chapter of the dissertation will answer the second question, how GEV used its social capital in the social affairs. The organization's network and all the affairs happened from July, 2003 to March, 2004 will be analyzed. For instance, in the Nujiang affair, GEV adequately utilized its advantage-familiar with the mass media. In the earlier time, GEV mainly used the mass media to publicize the harm of dam and made the dam plan delayed. And then, it utilized the social celebrity and international power to impel this defending war, finally it successfully influenced the core center government to change the decision. After that, GEV called on their volunteers to publicize again and consolidate their victory with photography exhibition, lecture, and tour to Nujiang to rouse the pubic realize the importance of the environmental protecting of Nujiang. In this defending war, the social network acted an important role. However, as a case study, this dissertation has some limitation as well.So the 6th chapter will discus...