Translating environmental and development agendas: influences of environmental NGOs on rural landscapes in China

Environmental NGOs (eNGOs) have become increasingly important in addressing environment and development issues in China. The majority of Chinese eNGO research views eNGOs as contributing to a democratic society and/or sustainable development. Some studies suggest that eNGOs in China are constrained by Chinese politics. This thesis aims to critically examine how eNGOs play their parts in China’s environmental and development issues, particularly in the context of rural resource use, which is central to livelihoods of rural populations. This research, adopting political ecology as the conceptual framework, seeks to understand how interactions among Chinese eNGOs and other institutional actors, including donors, international NGOs, different levels of government, and local communities, influence rural landscapes in China, a country wherein eNGO practices are embedded in their relationships with these actors across scales. The argument of this thesis is largely drawn from the case study of Green Watershed, a domestic eNGO, and its participatory resource management programme in Yunnan province. Three elements were employed in the methodology: discourse analysis, organisational ethnography and village ethnography. Discourse analysis was conducted to understand both the context within which Green Watershed operates and Green Watershed’s practices. The organisational ethnography and the village ethnographies of three villages in the organisation’s project area not only revealed interactions between the eNGO and other actors, but also the interactions within the eNGO itself. The key argument of this thesis is that the influences of eNGO practices on China’s rural landscapes are not merely inherited from eNGOs’ international linkages or simply constrained by government policy. Instead, the influences are the outcomes of the interactions between various actors across scales, which arise due to power relations, different world views and different priorities and interests of the various actors. The interactions influence the ways which environment and development philosophies translate from international agendas into local practice through eNGO projects. Rural landscapes, in which social relations and human-nature relationships take place, are consequently shaped by these interactions. The interactions between the projects and the local communities are particularly crucial in translating the agendas into practice, because of the critical roles played by the individual agency of the local communities. Local communities do not simply accept the external agendas. They may selectively adopt, translate or even reject the external agendas and/or philosophies. As community-based natural resource management (CBNRM) has gradually become popular among eNGOs for addressing resource issues in rural China, this thesis has taken the CBNRM model as a focus in order to produce a deep understanding of eNGOs’ influence on the ground. Based on empirical findings from the village case studies, I suggest that limitations exist in participatory CBNRM. First, participation is often complicated by politics and social relations, and therefore there is gap between the theory and the reality. Second, although participation is supposed to achieve empowerment, that empowerment programme may fall short of radically challenging power structure. Finally, there is a paradox in the concept of empowerment. Even when empowerment is achieved by participation, it does not guarantee good environmental governance as often expected in a CBNRM project. This is because that empowerment means enabling individual agents to have wider choices when making decisions, which may not follow environmental principles