Environmental NGOs

While enjoying rapid economic growth in the past two and a half decades, China has experienced rapid deterioration of its environment. Leaders in the Chinese central government recognized early on the need to take steps to protect the environment. Since the adoption of the Provisional Environmental Protection Law in 1979, the central government has passed many sets of pollution control regulations and environmental impact assessment requirements. Environmental protection bureaus (EPBs) have also been established at different administrative levels to enforce various environmental regulations (Sims, 1999), and a sizable number of service organizations were subsequently established to help strengthen the organizational capacity of these local EPBs (Lo et al., 2001a). Despite these government efforts, China’s environment has continued to deteriorate (Economy, 2004). It is in this context that environmental nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) began to emerge. While some of them are government-sponsored, most are initiated and run by private citizens. They range from relatively well-established organizations funded by international foundations to web-based organizations and informal associations among students in college campuses (Ho, 2001; Xiao and Zhao, 2002; Yang, 2005). According to a recent study conducted by the All-China Environment Federation, China was home to 2,768 environmental NGOs with 224,000 members by the end of 2005. ¹