Date: September, 28, 2012

Climate Change Law and Policy Forum No. 11 has invited Kathinka Fürst, researcher from Netherlands China Law Centre in Amsterdam, the Netherlands as the panel speaker, addressing a speech regarding the roles and functions of environmental private sectors in China. Recently, there are some scholars who had changed their research field of the control and management model in national sectors and switched it to researching private sectors when it comes to control and management measures of the environment. With this basis, researcher Fürst further discussed issues as follows during the forum:

1. The roles that non-governmental organizations play in industrial pollution governance;
2. Why and how environmental NGO participate in control and supervision of industrial pollution, and their functions in supervision, end, reduction and prevention of industrial pollution, and the considerations behind these strategies;
3. How the inner and outward premises influence environmental NGOs’ orientations, their potentials and roles.

Researcher Fürst established diverse and abundant cases as bases with field studies in her research methods, and then collect information through observing actions of Chinese NGOs. She also interviewed their representatives and read through related articles and regulations. Firstly, researcher Fürst analyzed 37 NGOs in China for their organizational participation, current statuses, and histories regarding industrial pollution supervision.

1. Involvement period: In 1990s, there has been NGOs involving in industrial pollution supervision, but the number of such NGOs grew significantly after 2000, while the government’s tolerance for environmental NGOs differ in different regions.

2. Issues handled: Many NGOs think that the issues of handling pollution is too sensitive, therefore private environmental sectors do not handle all kinds of industrial pollution issues. For example, NGOs care more about water pollution than soil pollution when it comes to contaminant source. And many dedicated to the statuses before pollution rather than after the pollution.

3. Time involved: The time when environmental NGOs established and involved in industrial pollution are one of the reasons of their differences.

4. Functions and relationship with corporations: Most environmental NGOs have limited understanding as to how to effectively affect corporate behaviors, and think that Chinese corporate does not care about environmental NGOs.

With so many outward and inner reasons, environmental NGOs cannot fully strive in their supervision potentials. Researcher Fürst addressed that, there are a couple of supervising functions that NGOs did achieve: collecting and exposing information, pushing dialogues, raising awareness of the citizens in environmental pollution and its education, setting up standards, assisting in litigation, ability development and providing services in the progression of ending, reducing and preventing industrial pollution. However, many outward and inner premises did limit the potentials and functions for environmental NGOs in supervising industrial pollution: from the inner premises perspective, the limitation lies within the reliance to its founder, lack of managing abilities, lack of quality in human resources, short of social resources, and insufficiency in technological abilities. As to the outer reasons, geographical location is one of the limitations. Other outward reasons include attitudes from the government, limited sources of stable fund, trust and distrust outside of the NGOs, and regulations causing limitation for environmental NGOs to develop freely. All in all, environmental NGOs did have become many forms affecting influences in supervising environmental pollution, such as the influences to particular cases, assisting or pressuring to law enforcement, applying different methods pressuring corporations to make promises, pushing and changing supervision standards for more effective implements, anti-monopoly in decision making, allowing diverse opinions in public debate and challenging mainstream voices in environmental development, and connecting democratic procedure with environmental movement. However, there are different opinions as to the influences generated by different actions, causing divergence in different environmental NGOs. For the connections between each cause; further issues shall be discussed.