ID: 1536
Presenting Author: Haiqing Geng
Session: 654 - Culture's Role in Impact Assessment
Status: pending
The exploration process, main achievements, and also problems of China's policy environmental impact assessment are summarized comprehensively.
Western governments have traditionally prioritized evidence‑based decision‑making, whereas China has relied on negotiations among key stakeholders, and value judgments playing a decisive role. As Chinese and Western civilizations continue to engage in mutual learning, factual assessment and value assessment have both come to occupy equally important poles in policy formulation and must work together to balance scientific and democratic decision‑making. With this in mind and in line with the reforms of decision‑making mechanisms, China has been steadily advancing the exploration and practice of policy Environmental Impact Assessment (Policy-EIA) since 2014. It has brought forward a foundational theoretical framework for Policy-EIA that integrates technical assessment with value assessment and can be effectively embedded into the policy‑making procedure. A technical guidance has been issued, and 17 pilot Policy-EIA projects were launched nationwide. This paper reviews the development of China’s Policy-EIA framework and its key considerations, main achievements, and illustrates through typical case studies how technical assessment can be effectively combined with stakeholder analysis and value assessment, so as to ultimately fostering consensus and solving practical problems.
Chief Expert & Full Professor at Appraisal Center for Environment and Engineering, Ministry of Ecology and Environment, China.
Coauthor 1: Nankun Li
Coauthor 2: Yanan Wu
Coauthor 3: Qianqian Guo