Dissertation

TITLE: ADVANCING DATA-DRIVEN ENVIRONMENTAL DECISION-MAKING AND GOVERNANCE IN CHINA 

My dissertation is comprised of four articles that seek to understand the strengths and limitations of applying empirical approaches to environmental policy evaluation and decision-making, with a particular focus on China. The first paper examines whether national environmental performance indicators developed using publicly-available data can be used to evaluate countries’ progress toward Millennium Development Goal 7 (MDG7) – to ensure sustainability – and other global environmental goals.  I argue that while global environmental movements such as the landmark 1992 Rio Earth Summit, which put sustainable development at the fore of national policy agendas, had a profound effect in spurring multilateral cooperation on global environmental issues, they overlooked the data requirements and monitoring infrastructure, particularly in the global South, needed to gauge whether targets were being achieved.  Moreover, goals like MDG7 had an effect of generating a path-dependency for indicators, constraining flexibility for the design of better, more policy-relevant indicators that reflect advancements in the scientific understanding of environmental problems.

The remaining three chapters of my dissertation developed in-depth case studies of China’s environmental governance structure, using indicators as a lens by which to understand institutions, politics, and actors.  In collaborating with the Chinese Academy for Environmental Planning, a government think-tank affiliated with the Ministry of Environmental Protection, the second paper in my dissertation systematically evaluated baseline environmental data at the provincial level in China, and provided an assessment of challenges – scientific and political – to developing aggregate indices of environmental performance in China.  Confronting political barriers to information access and data inconsistencies, I conducted around semi-structured interviews of provincial and municipal government officials in environmental protection bureaus and monitoring centers across nine provinces and two municipalities to understand center-local challenges with respect to environmental data collection and reporting for my third article.  This paper revealed major implementation challenges with respect to China’s vertical environmental governance structure, highlighting competing local economic incentives, variable institutional capacity and public awareness that affect high quality data collection.  Recognizing these data limitations, the last paper applied satellite data to develop air quality indicators for fine particulate matter (PM2.5) at the provincial level in China – a first look at subnational, long-term average exposure to PM2.5 prior to the public release of ground-level data in major cities in China.

Publications associated with this dissertation: