Information-poor environments: Asian tigers - Environmental Reform in the Information Age - page 248

environmental pollution. Consequently, local EPBs rely strongly on
citizen complaints as monitoring data, and priorities for control and
enforcement are more than incidentally set accordingly, instead of rely-
ing on their own monitoring and data collection programs (see later in
this chapter).
In addition to, and partly as a consequence of, these problems, relia-
bility and completeness of environmental data remain a major problem,
in China as well as in Vietnam. The discussion on China's contributions
to climate change via CO 2 emissions is telling in that respect. 20 But in
China, more than in Vietnam, there is a clear tendency to further public
disclosure and to improve and modernise the environmental monitor-
ing system. For instance, the present eleventh five-year plan (2006-
2010) has reserved RMB60 billion (around US$8 billion) for the entire
environmental monitoring system. And, by 2008, China expects to
have three additional satellites in the air for environmental protection
and disaster control monitoring. 21

E-government rather than e-governance

As noted earlier, China recently has become much more advanced
than Vietnam in using the Internet, ICT and digital technologies 22

in

20

At the turn of the millennium, a debate emerged on China's contribution to the
greenhouse effect, against the background of the U.S. refusal to sign the Kyoto
protocol. Sinton and Fridley ( 2001 ; 2003 ) and Chandler ( 2002 ) reported a
decrease of 17 percent in China's greenhouse gas emissions between 1996 and
2000 (based on official Chinese energy statistics), the International Energy
Agency estimated energy reduction to be 5 to 8 percent in that period, whereas
the American Embassy in China claims a zero growth of energy use in China
(http://www.usembassy-china.org.cn/sandt/energy stats web.htm, accessed
November 2003). See, for recent data on CO 2 emissions, the World Resources
Institute (http://earthtrends.wri.org).

21

Originally, these were planned for 2006, but this seemed to be too optimistic.
By the end of 2005, the complete proposal for environmental satellites was at
the planning commission and fifteen staff members were continuously working
on this plan at the EMC (interview deputy director EMC, November
2005).

22

From 1993 to 2001, China and Vietnam had the highest average annual
growth rates in the world on ICT spending, 27 percent and 26.5 percent,
respectively. In 2004, China and Vietnam spent 4.4 percent and 2.4 percent of
their GDP on ICT, respectively, and US$66 and US$20 per capita, respectively
(the average for low-income countries is 4.2 percent of GDP; source: World
Telecommunication Development Report 2006 database).