| Popis: |
China has undergone a social transformation since the establishment of its Reform and Opening-Up Policy, becoming a market economy under a socialist system. However, environmental problems associated with urbanization and economic development have become increasingly serious, and the government has been unable to address these problems. This situation was affected by the emergence of environmental NGOs in the 1990s, which played an important role in environmental governance. Previous researchers have used the “state and society” paradigm, which is based on civic society theory, to analyze the development of environmental NGOs in China and determine whether environmental NGOs are independent from the powerful government in environmental governance. The aim of these studies is to answer questions like “Are there environmental NGOs that operate autonomously under the current situation of strong state power in China?” or “What kind of relationships do environmental NGOs have with the state and what functions do they perform in the public domain of environmental governance?” The authors’ previous study found that the development of environmental NGOs diff ers from the trend of the “state and society” paradigm because NGOs interact with the strong government in various senses of development in social transformation in China. Social transformation researchers have found that the “state and society” paradigm does not fi t the reality of China, so they have established the “institutions and life” paradigm. The aim of this study is to investigate the limits of the “state and society” paradigm presented in earlier studies and introduce an alternative paradigm of “institutions and life” to explain the involvement of NGOs and the environmental governance of social transformation in China. Here, “institutions” refers to formal institutions established in the name of the state that support its agents at various levels and in diff erent departments in the exercise of their functions, and “life” refers to the everyday activities of social beings, involving not only the interests, powers, and rightsbased claims of expedient production and life strategies and techniques, but also relatively routine popular mores and informal institutions. According to this new paradigm, environmental NGOs interact with powerful governments through informal practices like personal relationships. Moreover, these informal practices can gradually promote formal institutions, such as the government’s admission of the subjectivity of environmental NGOs in the establishment of the environmental governance system. |
