Association for Public Policy Analysis & Management

Panel: Public Perception in Environmental and Energy Policy Making in China: Toward a Bottom-up Policy Making Approach

(Natural Resource Security, Energy and Environmental Policy)

The mounting challenges of environmental degradation in China have given rise to a growing scholarly interest in the country’s environmental governance practice and how it may contribute to the ongoing debate on environmental policy making and implementation. A critical component of the changing environmental governance regime in China has been the rise of citizens’ concern over environmental issues, as well as their willingness to participate in both environment-friendly behavior and environmental policymaking process. Citizens’ attitudes and participation have played significant roles in the policy process while national and local governments seek innovative measures to address environmental issues. More notably, many recent policy failures, such as the local resistance towards nuclear facility construction and the ineffectiveness of reducing automobile dependence in transportation, are attributed to public perception changes. As scholars attempt to make sense of citizens’ evolving attitudes and participation in energy and environmental policy process, much of the existing literature tends to focus on individual-level variables such as knowledge, trust and so on. Far less attention has been given to external variables influencing the formation of individual environmental perception and behavior, or the intrinsic dynamics between citizens’ perception and behavioral change, public participation, and policymaking process. This proposed panel addresses this intellectual gap with a series of empirical research on the relationship between citizens’ public perceptions and local policy process in energy and environmental policy arenas. While all papers are focused on the context of China, we seek to facilitate a scholarly dialogue with international scholars and potentially extend and/or challenge the existing understanding of the bottom-up policy making approach largely developed in western democratic contexts. Four papers are included in this panel, each focusing on the role of public perception in different stages and aspects of policy processes. In the first article, with using the survey data from four cities in China, Dai and Liu investigate how citizens may possess different attitudes (i.e. acceptance or opposition) toward different types of government-proposed pubic projects (industrial plants, infrastructure, affordable housing, and garbage facility), and how such public perception may affect the way the common public influence policy process. In the second article, Liu and Wang present a multi-level analysis to empirically investigate the relationship between city-level environmental governance factors and individual-level environmental concern in urban China. In the third paper, Guo and Zhang select public communication campaign in the nuclear power field in China as the case, and test the effects of public communication on public opinion with questionnaire survey data. In the fourth paper, Xu, Jiang and Shao investigate people’s adaptation and mitigation behaviors in response to air pollution and the driving factors behind them.