A Study On Public Participation In Environmental Management Under "Not-In-My-Back-Yard"

"Not-In-My-Back-Yard" is a grass-root campaign in which the public take initiativeto boycott some public programs because of environmental concerns. As publicenvironmental awareness grow consistently, such movement appears in many cities as anexpress of protest to the government and society. In recent years, various levels ofgovernment started to increase investment in environment management, regarded it as oneof the essential impetus of social economic development, and incorporate environmentaltargets into economic and social development performance assessment, which addressedmany public-concerned environmental problems. However, with the increasingly thrivingof environment protection,"Not-In-My-Back-Yard" campaign was launched in cities likeBeijing and Guangzhou in protest of the construction of refuse treatment plant or chemicalplant around communities. This type of campaign rapidly spread to other cities and makesome impact on the society. To dig the reason, although the negative effect of"Not-In-My-Back-Yard " projects that cause potential harm to surrounded residents are theobjective reason of such phenomenon, the essential reason is that the elite publicdecision-making model exclude the participation of public, which lead a closeddecision-making environment that cause public panic.This paper integrates three well-known environmental incidents,"PX Project " inXiamen, Dalian, and Ningbo, deeply discusses "Not-In-My-Back-Yard" from theperspective of public administration using theories such as environment fairness anddemocratic consultation, and analyzes changes and obstacles in the environmentalmanagement problems represented by "Not-In-My-Back-Yard" campaign. It aims toprovide more effective method of government environment management based onindividual case and relevant experience to avoid "Not-In-My-Back-Yard" duringgovernment management process.This paper contains five parts. First part is introduction, which presents thebackground and meaning of this research, summarizes domestic and overseas research on"Not-In-My-Back-Yard", and indicates research contents and methods; the second part presents a theoretical analysis on public participation and environmental management asvalid theoretical foundation for the following case study; the third part retrospects andcompares three recent "Not-In-My-Back-Yard" cases to analyze that the absence of publicparticipation produced deviations in environmental management; part four deeplydiscusses the challenges from "Not-In-My-Back-Yard" on environmental management;part five is a prospect of inevitable trend that public will play an important role in thefuture environmental management. This article will provide reference for an effectiveenvironmental management.