The Challenge to Facility Siting in China. C. Liu, Clark University
Since the 1980s, facility siting has become an increasingly difficult policy issue in the western countries due to public opposition to unwanted facilities. In China, the confrontation between decision makers and the public has not been so conspicuous as the western countries, and the public participation issue has been largely ignored. However, when we examine the siting experience in Taiwan in the past two decades, we found that the three factors leading to the public opposition movement in Taiwan (NIMBY is one significant syndrome of the movement) are also developing on Mainland China: increased public environmental awareness, growing civil society power, and declining trust in the siting institutions. Based on these comparisons, we believe in the near future, China has to face the same rigorous challenge from public opposition as Taiwan. Currently China has made some significant changes to its siting approach which is essentially a technically based siting screening and selection process: taking into account the interests of local communities, bringing in the principle of public participation, and developing the procedures of public participation. However, these changes have not yet been effective in solving the public opposition problem because of the limited public participation. Therefore to face the future challenge of stronger public opposition, China will need to drastically adjust its siting approach, and to develop more participatory procedures in the siting process.
Many thanks to Professor Roger Kasperson for his great advice and encouragement.
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