Civil society organizations in China: Navigating the local government for more inclusive environmental governance

Abstract

This article examines how civil society organizations navigate local government to secure more inclusive environmental governance. Based on an in-depth case study of water governance in Zhejiang Province between 2012 and 2018, we find that Green Zhejiang, a civil society organization, exercised informal power to hold the local government accountable based on two strategies: mobilizing citizens to collect information on water pollution and strategically leveraging the authority of provincial government to find citizen-focused solutions. Most existing studies foreground one stage of the policy process – advocacy in the agenda-setting phase, policy entrepreneurship during the design phase, or monitoring during the implementation phase; however, we examine strategies of civil society organizations throughout this policy lifecycle. With this approach, we are able to analyse the strategic interactions between different levels of the government and civil society organizations and locate the positive outcomes and limits under the current governance system. Despite policy successes, Green Zhejiang still acts informally, which limits long-term effectiveness. However, incorporating citizens into public administration in a meaningful way requires sharing policymaking power formally, and thus far, local governments are only willing to share power in an ad hoc and informal way. More institutionalized citizen participation is necessary to develop innovative solutions to the severe environmental degradation in China.

Keywords

Zhejiang Province public policy process civil society organization citizen participation environmental governance inclusiveness

Citizen participation is often cited as a key ingredient to good governance in that it not only secures citizens’ civil rights, but it also contributes to a more stable and legitimate political order. Good governance requires an inclusive public administration that balances multiple policy goals and reflects, or at least protects, different groups in society. From this perspective, it is important to study citizen participation to examine the extent to which this participation is changing the governance structure.

China still maintains an exclusive model of public policy even after its reform and opening up in the 1980s. The party-government retains decision-making power and does not share it with other entities, except through informal consultations.¹ Such exclusive policy practice has led to suboptimal outcomes for vulnerable citizens and groups, and it has given rise to informal citizen participation as a substitute, such as social protests, mass incidents, or online activism. For example, workers in urban areas² and over-taxed peasants³ in the countryside are two of the largest problems in local governance in the 1990s, after which land conflicts began to occupy the newspaper headlines as local governments and real-estate developers benefitted at the expense of the dispossessed.⁴ However, most of these problems were resolved by citizens’ desperate sacrifice of their rights and welfare,⁵ and in some cases, by local governments’ concessions, such as instances where the local government adjusted its policy on land compensation.⁶

The challenges resulting from environmental pollution, however, cannot be addressed simply by revising any one policy. Since the mid-1990s, media stories on environmental degradation and its consequences for citizens’ health have been frequently reported. As early as in 1998, the China Quarterly organized a special issue on China’s environment to warn about the environmental pollution accompanying rapid industrialization.⁷ Without substantive change of policy and governance structure to deal with such problems, the number of environmental protests has grown significantly since 2000. Scholars interpreted these as the conflict between the developmental-oriented state and society.⁸ In recent years, however, the academic community has begun to perceive pollution as an issue that has to be addressed through collaboration between the state and society, rather than as a problem between the two sides. This change of perspective has two origins. First, studies have revealed that society is not a monolith in environmentally related issues.⁹ Despite a common understanding of the degradation, the conflicts concerning environmental issues are situated among citizens. While middle-class citizens fight for a healthy environment, some lower-income families and areas still rely on highly polluting industries for job opportunities and taxes to fund public services.¹⁰ These challenging trade-offs are reflected in studies discussing the enforcement–compliance paradox in China’s environmental-related regulation.¹¹ In this issue area, the government cannot solve problems simply by changing its own policy agenda but must develop its governance capacity to balancing between competing governance goals, time horizons, and conflicting interests among different social groups.

Second, China began to adopt a sustainable-oriented policy agenda, yet its governance system does not seem to support the new goal of ‘green development’. In January 2013, the Chinese government officially acknowledged the severe problem of pollution and began to prioritize environmental governance to respond to public concerns and advance more sustainable development. The Third Plenary Session of the 18th Central Committee of the Communist Party of China added ‘environmental protection’ as the fifth function of Chinese local government. This shift in focus at the central government level does not guarantee improved governance at the local level, however.¹² In a decentralized administration system, municipal and county government are responsible for both environmental protection and economic development, and previous studies find that local governments are reluctant to sacrifice economic revenue for environmental protection.¹³ This is exacerbated by the fact that frequently rotated officials are likely to choose low-quality and short-term approaches to implement environmental policies, creating environmental policy implementation gaps.¹⁴ Despite all these problems with a decentralized governance system, centralization is not a feasible solution to environmental governance.¹⁵ For one thing, local governments often take advantage of information asymmetries and collude with each other in response to top–down supervision.¹⁶ This often reduces the target-management system to a paper tiger that ‘commands without control’.¹⁷ Bypassing local government by using mass campaigns, the traditional mobilization system could ensure policy implementation at the local level, but often triggers ‘over-prioritization of environmental goals over other goals’.¹⁸ This governance structure leads to the administrative system veering between developmentalism and environmental radicalism.

Effective environmental governance requires the ability to manage conflicts of interest and to secure accurate information, both of which are challenges for China’s administrative system. In response, the Chinese government is constructing an environmental governance system led by local government with participation from companies, social organizations, and citizens. Environmental governance refers to the ‘set of regulatory processes, mechanisms and organizations through which political actors influence environmental actions and outcomes’.¹⁹ Despite the fact that the National Party Congress has acknowledged the critical role of citizen participation, it is worth noting that the behaviour of state agencies is still quite ambivalent, ‘shifting between support and restriction’.²⁰ Studies on local environmental governance have also presented contradictory findings from case to case. While some cities such as Guangzhou, Shanghai, Nanjing, and Hangzhou are conducting new institutionalized mechanisms such as ‘citizen consultation committees’ and ‘triangular dialogues’,²¹ others continue to ignore citizens’ appeals,²² or simply use citizen participation as window dressing or pageantry.²³ Such variation suggests that citizen participation has not been institutionalized, and it also confirms that there is limited space for citizen engagement within environmental governance. It is in this context that we suggest that certain strategies of civil society organizations might lead to more robust environmental governance. We find potential for citizen participation not only to improve the outcomes of environmental governance, but also to mitigate certain aspects of China’s administrative system in crisis.

Based on an in-depth case study of water governance in Zhejiang Province, we argue that specific strategies employed by civil society organizations could contribute in a limited but important way to a more inclusive governance system in contemporary China. We chose the case of Green Zhejiang in water governance for two reasons. First, water governance represents a typical governance crisis in contemporary China. It is a setting of a society with growing diversity and of a multi-level government system with varied goals but no popular representation mechanism. Second, Green Zhejiang is a civil society organization that developed without a formal registration status, with limited resources, and weak connections with the party-state. Its progress and limitations thus further our understanding of the potential of such organizations to contribute to China’s governance.

Tracing Green Zhejiang’s participation in water governance between 2012 and 2018, we find that professional civil society organizations, by mobilizing citizens to collect information on water pollution and strategically leveraging the authority of provincial party-government, exercise informal power to hold the local government more accountable for environmental governance. At the agenda-setting stage, Green Zhejiang worked together with provincial media to foster mass mobilization. These efforts of encouraging citizens to expose water pollution have successfully turned the online campaign of finding ‘swimmable rivers’ into an enduring public issue by making water governance a key task of the provincial government, and by pressuring local governments to take water pollution more seriously. During the policy implementation stage, Green Zhejiang initiated round-table discussions to enable stakeholders to balance interests in water governance. This mechanism helps to prevent unintended consequences because local governments sometimes would over-prioritize environmental goals. However, incorporating citizens into public administration in a meaningful way requires sharing policymaking power formally, and thus far, this is not happening in Zhejiang. More robust and formalized citizen participation is necessary to develop innovative governance solutions at the environment–health–development nexus.

Citizen participation and environmental governance in China

In his speech to the 19th National Party Congress on 18 October 2017, the General Secretary of the Chinese Communist Party Xi Jinping outlined his goal to construct an environmental governance system led by government with participation from companies, social organizations, and citizens. Given the exclusive government system in China, this goal to encourage citizen participation in environmental governance might seem counterintuitive. Although a growing awareness of environmental protection has driven citizens to be more active in environmental governance,²⁴ there is very limited space for citizen participation. China is often described as a model of ‘authoritarian environmentalism’, where ‘public participation is limited to a narrow cadre of scientific and technocratic elites while others are expected to participate only in state-led mobilization for the purposes of implementation’.²⁵ In the 2000s, there were cases of successful citizen participation in some cities; however, consistent citizen engagement is still lacking. Even when there are successful cases of policy change at the local level,²⁶ the government’s response to citizen activism is usually ad hoc, rather than institutionalized.²⁷ In this context, Xi’s statement encouraging citizen participation in environmental governance is surprising. Why would a powerful authoritarian government create an environmental governance system with a focus on mechanisms for citizen participation?

This puzzle results from the fact that China governs the environment through a large, complex, and geographically distant government bureaucracy, where regulations created by the Ministry of Environmental Protection or other relevant ministries are then implemented by a cascading hierarchy of local governments with increasingly less capacity. Although China has passed strong environmental regulations throughout the 2000s, many local governments do not enforce these due to either poor technical capacity or conflicts of interest, such as fining or closing polluting factories that provide jobs. This results in what many scholars refer to as the environmental ‘policy implementation gap’.²⁸ Xi Jinping and central environmental officials appear to agree with these scholars and have decided that one way to overcome this implementation gap is to increase citizen participation. In 2015, the Ministry of Environmental Protection issued the Measures for Citizen Participation in Environmental Protection, which confirms three main approaches for citizen participation: to get access to environmental-related information, to be involved in public hearings on related environmental impact assessment, as well as to supervise enterprises and local government agencies.²⁹ Increasing citizen participation in environmental governance might also educate the public about environmental issues,³⁰ incorporate citizen preferences into decision-making, foster trust in institutions, reduce conflict, and make decisions more cost-effective.³¹ As Guizhen He et al. argue:

Implementation of environmental policies could be further strengthened by a stronger countervailing power from civil society. The development of an active civil society in the field of environment is definitely in the making. Environmental NGOs have emerged throughout the country, both nationally and locally; the number of environmental demonstrations and protests is increasing, often linked to pollution, health and food safety; a well-functioning environmental complaints system is present; the media are becoming more and more active and open in reporting on environmental accidents and controversies (Yang and Calhoun, 2007; Yang, 2010); environmental disclosure policies are legally installed; and more participatory policy-making can be witnessed (e.g. in EIA, water policies; Johnson, 2010; Zhong and Mol, 2008). Participation of environmental NGOs or the public in decision making is still limited and official policies on disclosure, participation, protest and media reporting are often overruled, especially by local state and economic interests. This comes together with a still poorly functioning system of the rule of law, where environmental victims can start procedures against polluters that harm them in some way. Only very recently the first NGO got access to the judicial system.³²

Environmental governance is not the only area in which the Chinese government encourages citizen participation. Since 2004, the Chinese government has gradually provided channels for citizen participation throughout the policy process from decision-making to implementation. For example, local governments are required to organize public hearings when making major administrative decisions.³³ Some local governments have also introduced deliberative polling and other consultative practices in policymaking.³⁴ However, most citizen participation is encouraged at the stage of policy implementation. For example, there are cases of collaborative service delivery,³⁵ social control of the government,³⁶ and even state–society collaboration in co-production.³⁷ Additionally, most forms of citizen participation supported by the government are either symbolic or instrumental. Without substantive power-sharing between the state and society, the effectiveness of citizen participation is debatable. Research to date on these developments has generated both complementary and contradictory findings. Some scholars consider China’s quasi-democratic mechanisms to be primarily instrumental, such as information tools with which the government can collect citizen preferences and reflect them in public policy,³⁸ or management instruments to help government agencies deliver public services more efficiently.³⁹ In other words, citizen participation is not acknowledged by the government because it is the right of citizens, but because it could serve governance. Thus, these forms of citizen participation should not be seen as indicators of true citizen empowerment in the policy process.⁴⁰ Yet even state-dominated citizen participation could provide citizens with some (albeit limited) influence in public policymaking and implementation in areas that are not politically sensitive.⁴¹ Therefore, some scholars suggest that participatory mechanisms may create more responsive policymaking and constrain the behaviour of local officials.⁴²

Formal channels of citizen participation in environmental governance have similar forms and outcomes as in other areas of policymaking and administration. For instance, it is stipulated that local government shall conduct environmental impact assessment (EIA) before initiating major infrastructure investment projects. However, case studies repeatedly show that such assessments are mostly instrumental, and they are used either to legitimize decision-making processes⁴³ or to ‘function as decoys to defuse rising social discontent’.⁴⁴ To ensure policy implementation, local officials tend to exclude unwelcome citizens from policymaking processes and encourage supportive citizens to use their knowledge and resources for environmental governance.⁴⁵ Local government sometimes mobilizes citizens to hold lower levels of government accountable, but then refuses to accept the ‘free flow of information and full participation of citizens’, which results in only ‘contingent participation’⁴⁶ in environmental governance.

The government is more likely to incorporate citizen participation from formal institutions designed by government itself.⁴⁷ However, if formal institutions tend to lack meaningful power-sharing, then a combination of informal and formal participation may be more effective in achieving intermediate goals such as bringing attention to problems, monitoring violations, and collecting citizen information for authorities. In environmental governance, informal citizen participation is often effective in policy change, as long as this participation is depoliticalized⁴⁸ so that it does not challenge the authority of central government⁴⁹ nor build coalitions in a fragmented government system.⁵⁰ However, local governments’ responses to informal citizen demands are mostly ad hoc, and concessions are mainly for social stability.⁵¹ Repression, instead of concession, is more often used by local government in dealing with social protest.⁵² In other words, even if citizen policy entrepreneurs can successfully affect policymaking in some issue areas, those successes will be difficult to sustain consistently over time and across multiple issue areas.

Another problem of informal citizen participation in environmental governance is the lack of organization. Most citizen activism or social protests are individually based and loosely organized.⁵³ It is in this context that scholars began to examine the role of environmental non-government organizations (ENGOs) in China’s environmental governance. In recent years, the number of ENGOs in China has grown. Although most ENGOs intentionally limit their work and do not organize environmental protests to avoid repression,⁵⁴ some of them are expanding their roles in environmental governance, have made some progress promoting local policy change,⁵⁵ and are involved in the law-making process as experts.⁵⁶

Although intermediate goals fall short of granting citizens status as equal stakeholders in environmental governance, it is also unclear whether participation improves social and environmental outcomes for citizens. Beyond the recent studies of citizen participation in public administration cited here, further research is needed to explore the effects of participatory processes on citizen satisfaction, policy design, administrative accountability, and transparency. Particularly, the role of ENGOs requires further attention in order to depict the dynamics of environmental governance in China. Currently, we lack a deep understanding of what and how public participation matters to socially beneficial environmental outcomes, including the systematic influence on China’s governance system through ENGO organized-citizen participation. As Genia Kostka and Arthur Mol point out, ‘Regardless of the many claims regarding the environmental gains of more participatory policy models and measures, empirical evidence, indicating that more participation provides better environmental outcomes is still rather thin.’⁵⁷

Citizen participation mobilized by civil society organizations in Zhejiang’s environmental governance

We use the case of Green Zhejiang’s participation in water governance in Zhejiang Province to examine the role of civil society organizations in organizing citizen participation in a hierarchical environmental regulation system. Water pollution has been a consequence of fast industrialization in China, and this is especially true in Zhejiang, a coastal province with rapid economic growth. Zhejiang’s water quality has declined significantly since 2000: Zhejiang’s Provincial Environmental Protection Bureau found that the proportion of drinkable water sources (level III and above) declined from nearly 80 per cent in 2000 to slightly over 50 per cent in 2001, and poor-quality water (level V or worse) increased to around 30 per cent in 2004. This results in observable health issues for citizens. In 2009, there were 20 ‘cancer villages’ in Zhejiang, although only nine from among them were officially reported.⁵⁸ During fieldwork, residents from rural areas warned researchers to stay away from the rhizomatic crops grown in these areas, because ‘they are harmful due to the polluted water and soil’.⁵⁹

Despite the obvious consequences for citizen health, water pollution is not an easy problem to address due to the failures of selective policy implementation in China’s public administration system outlined earlier. As early as 2009, the provincial government issued a performance evaluation framework for water quality.⁶⁰ Yet this performance management system, which was expected to initiate a ‘tournament’ among ambitious cadres, was ignored by nearly all local governments who refused to sacrifice economic interests for clean water, because to do so would risk triggering social instability as local citizens lost jobs and other economic opportunities. Additionally, with 11 prefectural-level cities and 89 urban districts, counties, and county-level cities, it is difficult for Zhejiang’s provincial government to regulate all of them at the same time.

Concerned citizens could report pollution behaviour to local authorities. However, these reports are often random and fragmented, and are very likely to be deliberately ignored by local authorities. In a national survey in 2015, nearly half (48.7 per cent) of Chinese citizens thought that local government would not respond to reports on illegal discharges or would delay their response for a long time.⁶¹ As traditional public administration was demonstrated to be ineffective, a new model of citizen participation mobilized by civil society organizations emerged in response. Green Zhejiang has participated in water governance since the beginning of 2013.

We find that as a professional ENGO, Green Zhejiang overcomes the disadvantage of disorganized and powerless citizen participation. First, Green Zhejiang successfully framed water governance as an important policy issue by mass mobilizing citizens to report water pollution in their hometowns via provincial media. Second, by providing necessary information for the provincial government to supervise its subordinates’ implementation of environmental policy, Green Zhejiang also ‘borrows’ some informal power from the provincial authority to hold the local government accountable, both to their superiors and to the public. Furthermore, the ENGO also promoted a model of more inclusive environmental governance after the provincial government declared water governance as a high-priority key task. Since 2014, Green Zhejiang has provided a platform for round-table discussion for stakeholders in water governance. This strategic move was important to prevent unintended consequences because some local governments quickly implemented top–down assigned tasks, instead of promoting inclusive governance at the local level for more beneficial policy implementation. Based on a combination of statistical evidence, review of official documents, and interviews with government officials and ENGO leaders, we find that professional citizen participation mobilized by civil society organizations went beyond simply providing information to influencing policy change.

However, we also find that this type of participation often plays a consultative role as the government develops environmental policy, or an informational role to identify and punish those not following existing policies. If the provincial government continues to expand these roles to include more formal ones which treat citizens as true stakeholders, innovative ways of addressing environmental degradation might develop in China, such as social justice approaches working with those most affected by environmental degradation.

The primary strategy: Growing by collaboration with government and media

Green Zhejiang is a professional environmental NGO (in the Chinese context, it is called a ‘social organization’ 社会组织) founded in 2000. The founders, Ruan Junhua and Xin Hao, are both well-educated experts from Zhejiang University with close connections to environmental scientists and professionals in water governance. They believe an NGO should be a professional organization: ‘ENGOs should be perceived as a profession rather than some spare time job with low pay’.⁶² To achieve such goals, Green Zhejiang began as a locally based social organization with limited resources, and it has explored several strategies to raise funds. Over the years, it has organized environment-related public activities for big corporations, organizing charity bazaars for local enterprises, as well as designing and selling recycling garbage collection stations for communities. Since 2012, Green Zhejiang has received awards from different levels of government. Thanks to its diversified fund-raising strategy, Green Zhejiang is able to locate its headquarters in the downtown area of Hangzhou, and it offers an annual salary of over RMB 100,000 to employees. Today, Green Zhejiang has grown to be the most influential ENGO in Zhejiang Province, although its founders still would worry about sustainable funding from time to time.⁶³

As a civil society organization in China, it is Green Zhejiang’s connection with the party-state, rather than solely with experts, that paved the way for its development. It is important to note that Green Zhejiang is not a government-organized NGO, but it has intentionally adopted the strategy of ‘growing by participation’⁶⁴ to win endorsement from the party-state system. Before 2014, mainland China required a Dual Supervision Management System that stipulated that social organizations not only have to register with the bureau of civil affairs, but also must find an official agency for supervision. Yet most government agencies were not willing to supervise NGOs due to concerns about NGOs creating political problems for supervisory agencies, since these regulations required sharing political responsibility.⁶⁵ Green Zhejiang contacted Zhejiang’s Provincial Environmental Protection Bureau repeatedly for nearly 10 months requesting that it serve as its supervisory agency but their request was not accepted.⁶⁶ After this rejection, Ruan found another path. He served as the secretary of the Youth League of the College of Environmental and Resource Sciences at Zhejiang University. He used his work connections within the Zhejiang Provincial Youth League to register Green Zhejiang as ‘The Environmental Branch of Youth Volunteers in Zhejiang’ of the Zhejiang Provincial Association of Youth Volunteers, which is supervised by the Youth League. At the ceremony for the founding of Green Zhejiang, he convinced the then secretary of the Zhejiang Provincial Youth League, Ms Ge Huijun, to officially recognize the organization and invited other party-state officials to hold concurrent posts in the NGO. Ms Ge later served as the Deputy Party Secretary of Zhejiang’s Provincial Party Committee, and also as the head of Zhejiang’s Provincial Publicity Department. Both her personal endorsement and that of the Zhejiang Provincial Youth League provided political protection and support for Green Zhejiang’s activities in environmental protection, including opportunities to work with companies and local governments. It is worth noting that Ruan did not have strong connections with the government when he initiated Green Zhejiang, but he intended to build ties with middle- and high-level cadres for better resources and support. This strategy worked well for Green Zhejiang. For instance, in 2010, a retired official from Zhejiang’s Provincial Department of Land and Resources introduced Ruan and Xin to several agencies to undertake collaborative projects. Among them, the project ‘Protecting Qiantang River’ alone contributed almost RMB 350,000 to Green Zhejiang between 2010 and 2012.

Close connections with the party-state reduces the risks entailed in organizing public activities, but does not require the state to share any power. To balance potential tensions between powerful local governments and companies with good environmental governance, Green Zhejiang learned to leverage the power of the masses through the media. First, the NGO extended its network of citizen participation by building three layers of long-term participants. The first layer includes two officially registered social organizations, Hangzhou Ecological and Cultural Association and Zhejiang Green Technology and Culture Promotion Association. The second layer is a secretariat composed of members of society, and the third layer is an alliance including local companies, university associations as well as the agency for middle- and primary-school students’ education in environmental protection.⁶⁷ By including different sectors of the community, university, and schools, Green Zhejiang has developed sustainable and trusted channels of mass mobilization. Second, Green Zhejiang also extends its connections to media companies at the provincial level. This connection developed accidentally from fundraising challenges when the NGO was first established. Unlike government-organized NGOs that receive funding from the government, Green Zhejiang is dependent on individuals and companies for donations. To raise funds, Green Zhejiang created environment-related activities for big corporations such as BP and Coca-Cola. This collaboration not only generated funding, but also helped Green Zhejiang develop media relationships, including connections with TV stations and celebrities.⁶⁸ Green Zhejiang’s experience in organizing environmental activities has helped it to forge a significant number of ties across public and private sectors that, as we discuss later on, enable Green Zhejiang to participate in environmental governance.

Stage one: Participation of civil society organizations as an information mechanism

In February 2013, a private entrepreneur offered a prize of RMB 200,000 to the environmental protection bureau chief in Rui’an City, Wenzhou, to swim in a polluted river.⁶⁹ This proposal was first made on a microblog (the Chinese version of Twitter), and it was reported widely on mass media, which led to more proposals. For instance, another netizen from Cangnan County, also in Wenzhou, offered RMB 300,000 to the local environmental protection bureau chief to swim in another polluted river. A few studies suggest that the Internet may facilitate offline collective actions.⁷⁰ However, as with many other online public issues, a few proposals to ‘invite the head of environmental protection bureau to swim’ tend to lose public interest after a short period of time. In this specific case, however, the participation of Green Zhejiang turned this flashpoint into a long-lasting public issue, and eventually promoted water governance to the top key task of the Zhejiang provincial government by 2014.

As leaders of an NGO working in environmental protection for more than 10 years, Ruan and Xin seized on the opportunity to turn popular attention into a public campaign.⁷¹ Building on its extensive network, Green Zhejiang designed a series of activities to mobilize disorganized citizens concerned about water pollution to pressure the local government and alert provincial authorities. Among its efforts, Find the Swimmable Rivers Campaign, a TV programme produced by Zhejiang Satellite TV, worked as an information mechanism exposing poor water quality. The resulting initiative garnered significant public attention and ultimately led to province-wide public action on water governance. This province-wide action caught enough attention in and out of Zhejiang Province, which informed as well as pressured the local governments, including the provincial-level government, to respond.

Find the Swimmable Rivers Campaign was initiated by Green Zhejiang and Zhejiang Satellite TV right after the online activity to invite environmental protection bureau heads to swim between 14 April and 12 December 2013. Green Zhejiang and Zhejiang Satellite TV produced 136 episodes that exposed polluted rivers, secured accountability for poorly governed rivers, and introduced models of good water governance. As an independent social organization committed to environmental protection, Green Zhejiang attracted allies such as environmentally concerned enterprises, university student groups, middle- and high-school students, as well as other volunteers from different parts of Zhejiang. This large group of volunteers provided information on local water pollution, after which the production team allied with water experts and conducted careful investigations to confirm the cases and assign responsibility. For example, on 17 July 2013, the programme reported wastewater discharge by factories in Yiwu, which were supposed to be closed by a local court. The judge refused to comment during the first interview, but one week later, the production team returned to Yiwu. Afraid that the repeated reports would catch the attention of superiors at the provincial level, local law enforcement agencies, with help from the environmental protection bureau and the court, shut down all 32 polluting factories and dismantled their facilities.

It is important to note that Green Zhejiang and its civil-society allies do not have any formal authority to force government agencies to do anything. However, by reporting detailed information on water pollution and identifying responsible institutions, this informal participation solved the problem of information asymmetry between the provincial government and its subordinates. As evidence of this, the then Provincial Party Secretary, Xia Baolong, reminded his subordinates in June 2013 to pay attention to pollution revealed by the TV programme, which then created competition around good water governance by highlighting good examples and bad ones. In other words, information itself is a source of authority. Furthermore, water pollution cases also contributed to the Zhejiang government’s change of policy concerning environmental issues. After reminding his subordinates of water governance in June, the Provincial Secretary proposed an official campaign on water governance during the Annual Economic Work Meeting of the Party Committee of Zhejiang Province in November 2013. Later in January 2014, the Campaign for Water Governance was the first of 10 key tasks of Zhejiang’s provincial government. In fact, water governance remained the top priority of the Zhejiang government until 2016, when Xia Baolong was transferred to Beijing to a new position.

The provincial party-government’s support, particularly the endorsement of the Provincial Secretary, has substantively empowered Green Zhejiang in water governance, albeit informally. As Xin learned through this experience, ‘Of course, NGOs are playing a promotional role; government has its important role such as its ability to carry out its functions on a larger scale, and we supplement this (with our app).’⁷² In this way, civil society organizations are able to play a role in the policy process: ‘We are a policy advocacy organization, promoting the foundation and implementation of the government policy process.’⁷³ To be clear, the provincial party-government never empowered Green Zhejiang in any formal way, but local governments became most sensitive about the possible exposure of water pollution from their area. In previous cases of media supervision, local government could ‘silence’ the interviewees during the TV programme.⁷⁴ In a hierarchical administrative system, however, prefectural- and county-level government cannot silence the Zhejiang Satellite TV which is directly supervised by the Provincial Publicity Department. This is an important strategy because civil society organizations empower themselves in interactions with local governments through their connections with higher-level government agencies.⁷⁵ Some local governments contacted Ruan personally and tried to convince or beg him not to expose their case on TV. His response was: ‘We do not want to embarrass local governments or their cadres. As long as they promise to deal with the pollution case, we are willing to drop the case on media.’⁷⁶ Xin explained the goal of their media strategy: ‘As NGOs, we do not want to compete or replace the government, but must work with government, give them inspiration, and nudge them [for better governance].’⁷⁷ In other words, the goal of Green Zhejiang is quite pragmatic: to improve water quality, rather than fight for the power to hold government accountable. In this way, power sharing in public policymaking and implementation are means, rather than ends. Due to these strategies, Green Zhejiang has overseen improving water quality in Zhejiang since 2013 (see Figure 1).

Figure 1.

Water quality in Zhejiang, 2000–2016.

Stage two: Initiate stakeholder discussion for inclusive policy implementation

In January 2014, Green Zhejiang and Zhejiang Satellite TV stopped producing the programme Find the Swimmable Rivers Campaign and instead focused on creating another daily show on water governance. The shift of focus followed from the Provincial Secretary’s decision to make water governance his top priority. In this hierarchical system, the Provincial Secretary’s attention would usually ensure better implementation on the part of lower governments.⁷⁸ Now that the local implementation of environmental policy was no longer the problem, there was concern that some local government officials might arbitrarily enforce environmental protection to prove their loyalty and inadvertently create unintended negative outcomes. In fact, one County Party Secretary had forced over 20,000 crystal factories to immediately close down and this caused protests in his jurisdiction.⁷⁹ In other words, local governments may move too quickly toward one-size-fits-all regulation and cause unintended harm, rather than thoughtfully implement the policies with community cooperation.

It is in this context that Green Zhejiang initiated another TV programme entitled Round-Table Meeting for Governing Our Water. As before, it was a collaboration between Green Zhejiang and the Zhejiang Satellite TV station. Recognizing that there were different interest groups in water governance, the round-table discussion aimed to balance the interests of all stakeholders and to compensate peasants and owners of small businesses affected during the water governance campaigns.

The round table functioned well to balance environmental governance with residents’ livelihoods by bringing representatives of polluting industries and government agencies to the same table to discuss possible solutions. To guarantee good dialogue, Xin, from Green Zhejiang, participated in the round table with the host from Zhejiang Satellite TV and experts in water governance and legal advisers. Such a framework created an atmosphere of open discussion and inspired the stakeholders to design new solutions. For example, in a round-table discussion in Shaoxing, the provincial policy required that the rural area be divided into three types of areas for livestock breeding based on their distance to water sources: forbidden areas, restricted areas, and unrestricted areas. The peasants from the restricted areas were affected by water governance because they not only had to reduce the number of livestock compared with those in unrestricted areas, but they were also unable to obtain the same level of compensation as their neighbours from the forbidden areas. To deal with this problem, Xin organized a round-table discussion and invited township leaders, responsible department heads from the county government, peasants, as well as experts in water governance and agricultural development. This round-table discussion ended with policy support from the township government and technical support from the county government to help relocate affected peasants into agricultural entrepreneurship businesses. Not all round-table discussions have had such success, yet this case demonstrates how consultation mechanisms can help balance policy implementation and employment or poverty alleviation concerns.

Although Green Zhejiang’s model of NGO-initiated citizen participation provided information and public attention to force pollution enforcement, it is a difficult model to sustain because it depends on continually attracting official attention through coordinated mass campaigns. In fact, the NGO’s ‘borrowed authority’ has declined after Xia Baolong’s transfer to Beijing. Also, it addressed only violations of existing pollution regulations and not policy designs or goals. In fact, many experts would argue that the success of water governance since 2013 has depended more on the Provincial Party Committee’s prioritization of water governance than on NGO mobilization.⁸⁰

Xin, the current head of Green Zhejiang, has tried to address problems related to the sustainability of this model by partnering with the Hangzhou municipal government to create a ‘river champions’ organization to consult with the government on water issues.⁸¹ Again, this consultative role does not confer decision-making power. The local government lacks a formal institutional arrangement to balance social forces with different water interests, and thus deflects or enforces environmental legislation depending on personal interests and public attention. Although it is impossible for us to distinguish the contribution of Green Zhejiang from other actions taken later by the provincial government, this case supports the argument that citizen participation initiated by groups such as Green Zhejiang may help secure more state accountability and responsiveness, at least during such campaigns.

Discussion and implications

The case of Green Zhejiang in water governance suggests that citizens and social organizations can participate meaningfully in environmental governance and achieve social justice outcomes without formal institutions. The citizen participation mobilized by Green Zhejiang was effective in achieving immediate goals, including citizen participation and increased satisfaction with environmental policy. Additionally, the government was better able to regulate with supervision from society, and water quality improved (see Figure 1). Certainly, not all citizen participation can achieve such goals. However, Green Zhejiang’s success shows that civil society organizations can bring atomized individuals citizens together and win the support of higher-level party-state officials. With this ‘borrowed power’, civil society organizations can even go a step further by not only highlighting the importance of environmental governance, but by creating an environmental governance policy process that is more inclusive. This case thus highlights citizen participation as a variable that can affect policymaking, going beyond simply providing ‘information for autocrats’ in the words of Melanie Manion.⁸²

However, the lack of formal power-sharing in the participatory mechanism – also known as ‘contingent participation’ – suggests that government aims to mobilize participation incompletely and without enabling the free flow of information.⁸³ Citizens are not treated as true stakeholders when their participation is constrained due to lack of full information and inability to impose substantial constraints upon the authorities. In such contexts, the strategies used by Green Zhejiang may offer the best possible results. To ensure that citizen participation achieves good environmental governance, civil society organizations should have some authority, even if it is borrowed and not formalized. Such contingent participation is successful in achieving environmental governance changes; however, as the case of Green Zhejiang illustrates, this requires effective strategies to create partnerships with party-state officials, exert public pressure through citizen mobilization, and help generate solutions. This relies on good strategies and constant, continuous efforts which are likely not sustainable over long periods of time. Thus, this model is successful in the short term but it is not a comparable substitute for formal channels for citizen participation in environmental governance.

The findings reported in this article also contribute to a growing base of knowledge about the impacts of citizen participation across policy spheres, including the environment–health–development nexus. This case study confirms previous research which finds that citizen participation not only empowers citizens, but also corrects for deficiencies of public administration in terms of accountability and representativeness. However, problems also persist, especially barriers to the sustainability of NGO-mobilized participation and challenges with meaningful citizen participation for government-initiated participation. Incorporating citizens into public administration in a meaningful way requires sharing policymaking power, and thus far, we do not observe this happening in Zhejiang or other provinces. As Chinese citizens become more concerned about the effects of environmental policy on health and social well-being, the current mechanisms for participation do not share enough policymaking power to support innovative solutions – such as environmental damage funds, ecological insurance, environmental equity/justice policies, and others – that are capable of improving social outcomes for citizens through better environmental policy and administration. This would require the central government of China to share some policymaking power with social actors, such as NGOs.

Footnotes

Notes

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