Information-poor environments: Asian tigers - Environmental Reform in the Information Age - page 258

informational governance. How far does the transitional process go in
allowing a public space with an active civil society to access and use
information in pushing for environmental reforms?
China has a very recent history of environmental NGOs and other
social organisations that articulate and lobby for environmental inter-
ests and ideas of civil society amongst political and economic deci-
sion makers (see Qing and Vermeer, 1999 ; Ho, 2001 ;Yang, 2005 : 51;
Martens, 2006 ; Stalley and Yang, 2006 ). As the first national environ-
mental NGO was only established in the mid-1990s, the history of this
sector is rather short. For a long time, government-organised NGOs
(GONGOs), such as the Beijing Environmental Protection Organisa-
tion and China Environment Fund, dominated the environmental 'civil
society' sector. 39 They had, and still have, more freedom of registra-
tion and manoeuvre than independent NGOs, because of their close
links with state agencies. Through closed networks with policy makers
and their expert knowledge, these GONGOs articulate environmental
interests and bring them into state and market institutions. In doing
so, GONGOs play a role in bridging the gap between NGOs and civil
society, on the one hand, and the state, on the other, thus “becom-
ing an important, non-state arena for China's environmental politics”
(Wu, 2002 : 48). Recently, these GONGOs have gained more organi-
sational, financial, and political independence and autonomy from the
state and are (thus) evaluated more positively by Western scholars. At
the same time, environmental NGOs are developing rapidly, although
these NGOs remain embedded in the Chinese state. Figures on the
number of NGOs are unreliable. Economy ( 2005 ) and Stalley and
Yang ( 2006 ) estimate around two thousand registered NGOs and an
equal number of unregistered ones, whereas Yang ( 2005 : 51) provides
more moderate (although rapidly increasing) numbers. 40 For the south-
ern province of Guangdong, Ping Song ( 2005 ) counted seventy-three

39

There are many kinds of GONGO, including foundations, education centres,
research institutions and industry associations. They are able to play a major
role in social and political developments because of their less restrictive
institutional structure, their expertise and the personal connections with
political elites.

40

In China, NGOs need to be registered. Registration can be in different forms,
but usually it means that these NGOs function under the umbrella of another,
existing organisation (a governmental organisation, a university, a research
institute or a private business). But industrial associations and professional
societies are often also included as environmental NGOs, making numbers