Public Participation in China's EIA Regime: Rhetoric or Reality?

The emergence of public participation in a country without the tradition of participatory democracy deserves investigation. Based on a case study of the YuanMingYuan dispute that led to China's first public hearing on the environmental impact of a project, positive progress towards a more transparent and inclusive decision-making process is examined. While the relevant provisions of the EIA Law, the Regulation on Information Disclosure, the Provisional Measures on Public Participation and the Measures on Environmental Information Disclosure all aim to facilitate public involvement in the EIA process, there are outstanding problems that hinder effective and meaningful participation. Major constraints include the limited extent of public participation in project EIA, limited access to information, limited impact of the public in decision-making, and limited access to judicial redress and remedy. A lot more efforts are needed to eliminate these constraints in order to fully realize the benefits of public participation.