China's environmental governance of rapid industrialisation

Abstract

China's state-dominated system of industrial pollution control has fallen short in mitigating the environmental impacts of rapid industrialisation. This article adopts a multi-actor governance framework to examine and understand the answers China is seeking for these failures, via establishing a new industrial environmental governance model. In this transformation process the role of China's environmental state has been changing along three parallel lines: modernising the existing environmental regulatory networks, decentralising environmental policy and capacity, and including market and civil society actors and institutions in environmental governance.