A Comparison of Water management in Eugene and Shaoxing

The statement of the problem

I am studying two cases of waterway management respectively in Eugene of U.S.A. and ShaoXing of China, because I want to find out what differences of local communities’ participation in the two cases and their relationships between local communities and governments, in order to help readers understand the significance of participation in community environmental management and how should we do to improve such public participation.

The sub-problems

A. Xiao-Shao canal

1. A general background of the pollution

(condition of the pollution, reasons, other relevant social changes, etc.)   

2. How many different interest groups show up in this waterway pollution and management case? And what are they doing attributing to the whole process? especially the specific forms and characteristics of the community participation.)

3. What are the reasons for the incapacity of government’s environmental governance?

(Possibly: the structure of political system, policies, loss of identity with nature; community participation, which is related to and important for the three first respects, and the relations among these groups.)

B. Amazon Creek

1. Background: A historical review of Amazon Creek (general background including pollution and management); Introduction of “Amazon Creek Priority Planning” project.

2. The same questions as A-2.

3. Focusing analysis on the situations the community participation. (What are the channels and forms of their participation? What are they doing in different steps? How do they deal with the relations with municipal government or other agencies in the project? )      

4. One more question is: is the experience from Amazon Creek possibly applicable for China?

The hypotheses

1. Although the government is thinking about to bring public opinion into the process of decision making, the space for local community is still not enough.  Instead, as the participating awareness develops, “illegal participation” which protests government’s policies or decisions show stronger need for local community.  

2. More normal channel for local community participation is necessary for China today, either because of political solidarity or environment protection.

In other words, healthy and adequate participation of local community will improve the environmental governance in China.

The importance of the Study

Try to figure out some valuable suggestions to improve the environmental management in China and provide some new voices for the community development theory.

Methods

Incline to quantitative methodology.

1. A textual content analysis of the EPA’s documents and records of the Xiao-Shao canal case. I hope it’s possible to do some field investigation or interviews of local people.

2. Since the information of Amazon Creek is more comprehensive, it’ll be good to seek, compare and analyze information from different groups.