On The Influence Of The Type Of Citizen Participation In The Policy Process

The core concept of public policy is citizen participation. In these years, with the improvement of citizens’ right consciousness and increasing concern to environment problems, citizens were proactively expressing their opinions via kinds of ways to support or protest environment policy made by government. From the "Xiamen PX incident" which triggered the beginning of the environment protest movement in China, to Waste Incineration Event in Panyu, and other environment event such as PX event in Kunming, The Three Gorges Dam Project, Nujiang Dam, antiseep project in Summer Palace, these events all forced ordinary people to stand out and participate in group movements or environment protection organizations to protect their own benefit or environment itself when facing government’s decisions. Their efforts won some fruits, parts of projects were canceled and parts were placed at other location after negotiation between citizens and officials. However, some projects were just stopped temporarily, they would be back quietly when conflicts faded. On the basis of the social background like this, this study tries to answer:what are the kinds of citizen participations in China environment policy area? Will different kinds of citizen participation result in corresponding policy results? Why different kinds of citizen participation will result in different policy results? And what are their logic thread?According to the questions listed above, this paper first reviewed present studies achievements, explained some basic concepts like policy process, citizen participation, environment policy etc. Second, this paper divided citizen participation in China environment policy into symbolistic participation and power execution participation according to Arnstein’s participation ladder theory. And then the specific meaning of policy result was defined. The multi-cases study way was adopted to describe the overall development of cases which had different kinds of participation. Typical case was chose to analyze, which indicated the influence of different kinds of participations to policy results.Finally, the conclusion is the citizen participation will effect government environment policy result. But the type of citizen participation and policy result are not definitely corresponding. How government interact with citizen and capability of citizen in participation and rational attitude toward participation process are also important.