International Environmental Ngos And Local Government Environmental Governance Research

In1972, the Club of Rome released a report called The Limits of Growth, in which a new concept "global issue" was proposed. Some statesmen with long-term vision were shocked but still quite open to it. Moreover, large-scale environmental movements were launched consequently ever since as well as international cooperation aiming at protecting the environment. The United Nations Conference on Human Environment at Stockholm was also held in the same year, which was considered as a milestone of the founding of the International Environmental Regimes. In particular, people should pay attention to the fact that the Economic and Social Council of UN turned to the ENGOs (Environmental NGOs) for support from the start of their preparations for the meeting. With their professional knowledge, information network and mobilization strategy, ENGOs was allowed to make their speech at the conference for the first time and gradually became very influential in the field of environmental governance.In response to the global environmental problem, China has put "environmental protection" into the Constitution in1978, and then announced it as one of the basic state policy of the country in1983. Furthermore, in1984, State Environmental Protection Administration was set up as an independent organization and was finally upgraded to Ministry of Environmental Protection of the PRC in2008. As the reform and opening-up policy has been boosted smoothly, China keeps opening its arm to the world and welcome supports from the international society to help solve its environmental problem. More and more ENGOs are invited to China to launch projects, which greatly promote the cooperation between them.This thesis uses the interaction between WWF and Shanghai as case study to investigate the method and strategy adopted by WWF when dealing its relation with the Shanghai government, such as pilot project, public education, medium publicity, policy advocacy and so on, which all can be learned by the local "grassroots organizations" of China. In their interaction, the ENGOs have found some perfect fit between their purposes and China’s development interests. However, there still exists many institutional barriers for their activities in China, which making high requests for their wit to give full play of the power of strategy on the one hand; on the other hand, China should also make efforts to perfect the related legal policy and regulation for its own sake.