The Green Leap Forward - Larson
Rated • 3 reviews • environment, china • washingtonmonthly.com
via delmoi / Metafilter, in The Washington Monthly by Christina Larson This breakdown in governance is so pronounced that, in defiance of Beijing's ambitious targets, the country's environment is getting worse, not better. Official reports likely understate the problem, but those numbers are troubling enough. Beijing vowed in 2002 to reduce sulfur emissions by 10 percent in three years, yet they climbed by nearly 30 percent.
...
To deal with this predicament, Beijing has invited help from an unexpected corner: civil society. Citizen groups can help spread information, provide oversight, and put some pressure on local authorities. The government granted legal status to NGOs in 1994, and green groups were the first to flood into this new space. Initially, they focused on innocuous campaigns like environmental education and trash pickup. In 2003 and 2004, however, environmental activists gained a major wedge in the door of the public policy process with the passage of a series of laws and accompanying regulations.
...
Still, no one knows how this peculiar experiment will play out. All that can be said for certain is that much is riding on Beijing's gamble. Not only will it influence whatever political path China may take in the future, but it could determine whether China can find a way to avert environmental ruin. Today, considerable international attention is focused on the question of whether Beijing will commit to specificenvironmental steps, such as putting numerical "caps" on its greenhouse gas emissions. What most outside observers don't seem to understand is that this question is, for now, largely beside the point. It won't make much difference if Beijing adopts carbon caps unless the government finds a way to convert its edicts into reality. To a great extent, then, hope for a cleaner earth lies with the ability of China's unlikely bedfellows, its mandarins and its environmentalists, to make this experiment work.
The gloom and doom side is the wilderness capitalism at play that cares about nothing to make profits and this happens unfortunately within an institutional void, for as Larson states there is a general breakdown of governance that impeaches the implementation of any of the "good" national laws being enacted.
This article sheds light on the reasons why the central government tries to take back the control of land use rights from the local authorities that formed the subject of this post.
