Institutional Analysis on Stakeholder Participation in China's Environmental Impact Assessment: A...

Environmental impact assessments (EIAs) play an essential role in promoting sustainable development by coordinating and balancing economic, social, and environmental objectives. As one of its mandatory components, stakeholder participation (SP) is designed to contribute to the implementation of EIAs as well as the relevant decision making with regard to a proposed project. Stakeholder participation ranges from being a token process to being a very effective practice; it has been criticized as ineffective in an authoritarian context. This research investigates the SP process of project EIAs via 3 case studies. A developed State-Attribution-Motivation- Interaction-Reengineering (SAMIR) framework is used to identify the causes, results, and substantive changes among 3 main actors or organizations: citizens, enterprises, and local governments. It demonstrates that the endogenous interactions among 3 institutional pillars-regulative, normative, and cognitive-are the root of institutional change. Initial cognitive actions can lead to regulative and normative social institutional change, thus stimulating the reengineering of the institutions' system relevant to SP. To facilitate institutional innovation and reengineering of SP with Chinese characteristics, it is of crucial importance to deeply reform and detail institutional design, to promote the SP governance structural change from a closed model to an open model. In order for such change to occur, the following are recommended: Move from government to governance, have institutional innovations follow the mass line, pay more attention to fairness rather than focusing on efficiency, and in addition, disseminate science and promote actors' communication. The benefits and advantages are instruments to overcome the "not in my backyard" (NIMBY) impact. And reengineering government structural change from and administration paradigm to a governance paradigm plays a primary role. Integr Environ Assess Manag 2019;15:607-620. © 2019 SETAC.