(China Daily)
Updated: 2008-03-25 07:30

The national environmental watchdog's latest upgrade into a full-fledged ministry is an overdue response to environment protection departments' well-touted sense of feebleness.

Implementation of the increasingly harsh environmental policies, which almost always contradict with local governments' aspirations for higher growth, entails coercive authority, which was exactly what the previous State Environmental Protection Administration (SEPA) wanted the most.

We fully understood the SEPA's complaints about being powerless in the face of wrongdoing by "same-level" government offices. The SEPA itself had fought relentlessly against local governments' rampant disregard of environmental consequences. We saw all that. But it is a matter of common sense that a government agency ranked slightly lower than its siblings has little, if not no, authority over a more powerful government office.

Finally able to stand shoulder to shoulder with other ministries, the Ministry of Environmental Protection, the previous SEPA, is obliged to be bolder and more assured in carrying out its duties.

That is why it is consoling to hear Minister Zhou Shengxian talk about "iron-like" mechanisms to execute the environmental department's supervisory and law-enforcing functions.

Becoming a ministry, which is at this point more nominal than substantive, itself does not guarantee the kind of changes we want. Those changes entail much more than a change on a nameplate.

For one thing, the current change, as part of the cabinet reform package, is limited to the ministry itself. The most serious problems, in contrast, were and still are at local levels, which means a substantial turn-around is out of the question until the reform reaches local governments.

Dysfunction of local environmental agencies derived not only from their de facto inferiority. The more serious aspect is that they are bogged down in the mire of local vested interests. While some of them were muffled by local leaders, others surrendered.

So the central task at local levels is to divest local watchdogs from narrow regional interests.

Then the question will be how environmental policies should be implemented. The environmental departments have blamed their ineffectiveness on the lack of law-enforcement powers, not to mention the manpower to enforce. How to define such powers? What kind of law-enforcement mechanisms best suit our practical needs?

Such questions press for immediate answers.

(China Daily 03/25/2008 page8)