Information-poor environments: Asian tigers - Environmental Reform in the Information Age - page 239

been one of the major problems of centrally planned economies.
With numerous incentives at all levels to distort information, limited
transparency in information collection and processing, hardly any
independent control on the reliability of information, and very lim-
ited independent information sources outside the government, ade-
quate information was never guaranteed (Lieberthal, 1995 ;Maand
Ortolano, 2000 ). This strongly influenced environmental governance.
With the transition process on its way, this is changing somewhat
(although to different degrees in the two countries), but the transi-
tional stage still affects the outlook and workings of informational
governance. Third, in the centrally planned economies of Vietnam
and China, formal organizational structures, arrangements and legal
regimes could constantly be bypassed by party politics, informal net-
works and unclear decision-making structures. This jeopardized con-
sistency, transparency and reliability in policy making and implemen-
tation, also in the field of environment. This is only changing slowly
in the transitional economies of today, and party politics continue to
work along parallel lines and arrangements of decision making. This
also enhances the risks (and practices) of corruption and bribing in
(environmental) policy making, exactly because transparency and con-
sistency are lacking. Finally, the transition process has its consequences
in the area of civil society and democracy. In Chinese and Vietnamese
environmental governance, civil societies play only a marginal role.
In both countries, there are hardly any nationally organised environ-
mental NGOs that can put pressure on the policy-making and the
economic systems to ecologise. Although in China we have witnessed
the first sprouts of national and local environmental activism and the
media seem to be given more freedom in reporting on environmental
misbehaviour, in Vietnam no such developments have been observed
at the time of writing (Mol and Carter, 2006 ; see later in this chapter).
Monitoring in Vietnam
Since 1995, Vietnam has a national environmental quality monitor-
ing system, in which the country is divided into three regions: North,
Central and South. One environmental research institute is responsible
for environmental quality monitoring in each region: CEETIA (HaNoi
Civil Engineering University) for northern Vietnam, the Environmental