Abstract

Environmental governance means to government, market or civil society which guide or encourage environment-related human behavior through formal or informal institutions, for the sake of achieving sustainability of ecosystem services. Researches on Chinese environmental governance always focus on seeking specific policies and measures to solve the environmental problems. As a result, the methodology about how to understand the environmental governance has been neglected. Consequently, it leads the studies carried out by disciplines difficult to form a theoretical system. Therefore, establish a general analysis framework is an urgent issue of China environmental governance research.

Firstly, the book has reviewed researches on environmental governance and analysis under framework of governance paradigm. It shows that either the-ories, analytical frameworks, or methodologies of these researches do not reflect the heterogeneity of environmental governance. In recent years, more and more studies find that there is a complex interaction between human society and the ecological system. The key feature of successful environmental governance system is to design diverse institutions to match local natural, economic and social conditions. In order to study how human societies and natural systems interact in different spatial, temporal and organizational hierarchy, it requires an inter-disciplinary or multi-disciplinary research to concentrate on integration of social system and ecosystem.

Scholars have developed series of comprehensive analytical frameworks about social systems and ecosystems and the relationship between them are taken into account in their studies. The book selects Human-Environmental System Framework（HES）, Management and Transition Framework（MTF）and Social-ecological System Framework（SES）as main frameworks, and systematically introduced and compared these three frameworks. It suggests that the SES is relatively better than the HES and the MTF in the terms of framework applicability, result comparability and data generality. The SES is the only one to consider social system and ecosystem at the same depth and can supports research on different degrees and different levels.

Secondly, the book selects grassland governance and water environmental management of river basin as samples, to examine and test the SES's applicability, generality and potentiality in the context of China. In the case of grassland-governance, the book does a comparative study between Abaga, Wushen, and Hongyuan. Here, the SES is used as a classification system to review existing literature and to focus on screening heterogeneity between different cases as well. The results show that the SES can be a good classification framework to organize existing research findings from different disciplines, not only to compare research between different cases in grasslands, but also can effectively identify the key variables that affect their sustainable.

In the case of water environmental management of river basin, the book chooses the Three Gorges Reservoir as an example. The SES is be using as a diagnostic tool to test its potential of applications. The results show that variables of the SES can be a good classification system to organize related research finds, identify some key issues, and analyze the interaction between different variables. These results suggest that the SES can be applied to more complex environmental governance issues.

In summary, the book concludes that the SES can be served as a basic analysis framework of China's environmental problems. This book also summarizes several experiences based on cases under the framework of the SES. Firstly, variables of SES are general and researchers should select the appropriate explanation according to the reality case. Secondly, analyze all variables of the SES is very difficult, which means the researchers should selected the appropriate number of variables based on needs of study. Thirdly, it is difficult to determine the consequences resulting from a particular variable, but it is relatively easy to identify the combined outputs of several variables. The key factor to use SES is tracking the results of different combinations of variables and causes.

Furthermore, in the application of the SES, the book finds its secondtier variables of interaction and outcomes do not fully reflect the rapid transformation and governmentled features of China's environmental governance. While the design of the MTF in these aspects is much better than the SES, more precisely, on the aspect in making an analytical distinction of governance process into the management process and the transition process; another is to add institutions and knowledge as outcomes of interactions. Later on, researches could try to build a more suitable analytical framework for China by integrating SES and MTF, and establish a Chinese environmental governance case database based on this new framework. This will be undoubtedly helpful to promote China environmental governance across the“panacea”, and eventually developed into a complete theoretical system.

Key Words: Environmental Governance; Social-ecological System; Social-ecological System Framework