ABSTRACT
In this chapter, a conceptual framework is constructed to describe and explain government strategies in governing Chinese environmental conflicts. It includes three key concepts: the policy game, government strategies, and the conditions that explain the application of government strategies. The policy game concept is used to analyze processes of environmental conflict resolution. The second concept, government strategy, is used to describe and categorize the concrete government actions that emerge in environmental conflicts. Six different government strategies, namely, go-alone, suppression, tension reduction, giving in, collaboration, and facilitation, are identified to function as an analytic tool to identify and categorize government actions in environmental conflicts. The third key concept is made up of seven conditions that explain the application of government strategies. They are: scale of protest, form of protest, position of higher-level governments, position of the national mass media, stage of projects, involvement of activists, and occurrence of events. The second main element of a conceptual framework is the relationship between the key concepts. Two approaches are used in this book to establish the relationships of the three key concepts: propositions and configurational thinking. Propositions are used to show how theoretically the individual conditions influence the application of government strategies. Configurational thinking allows us explore the causal relationships between combinations of the conditions and the application of government strategies.
