The Problem Of Government Environmental Responsibility Research

In recent years, China attaches great attention to the construction of Environmental Law System, aiming to eliminate the increasingly serious environmental problems, to ensure the quality of the environment, and to promote economic and social sustainable development. However, environmental quality hasn't got the expected improvement since the establishment of the Law. The reasons include historical, political, economic and cultural aspects. Among them, the key factor lies in the improper acts of government and its inaction in environmental protection management, which we can also call it"government failure". Government belongs to the people, and it is the practitioner of public welfare. It is the basic responsibility for a modern public service government to improve the level of public services, and protect the natural environment, and remain sustainable development. Therefore, it would be increasingly important to firm right environmental commitment of the government.Theoretical basis for government environmental responsibility is distributed into two classes——traditional and modern aspects. The traditional view can be further divided into three parts. They are of the public functions, the national environmental rights and civil environmental rights. While the modern view falls into two sections, of the public environmental benefits and of the environmental administrative public property. The Government Environmental Responsibility is based on the Public Trust Doctrine. In a broad sense, the government environmental responsibility includes the primary responsibility and the secondary responsibility. The primary responsibility refers to7 areas. They are responsibilities of environmental policy planning, decision making, system making, infrastructure, resource allocation, incident handling and loss of recourse. The secondary liability is the responsibilities that the government violated its primary responsibility and therefore should be assumed a result of the adverse consequences, mainly referring to the administrative responsibilities of the government. At present, the government's imperfect and lack of commitment to environmental responsibility lead to the deepening"government failure"in the field of environment. The reasons are mainly about the lack of the effectiveness, legislative framework as well as supervision, and the disadvantages the development theory brought to the ecological benefits under the nationalism mode. Therefore, establishing and improving the environmental responsibility not only concerns with the establishment of responsible government, the implementation of environmental democracy, the improvement of the legislative system as well as the adaptation to the ever-growing market economy, but in a higher level, it is also related to the improvement of ecological efficiency. With the country's further reform to the government functions and environmental administration, the conditions for the government environmental responsibilities are improved more and more mature. For such a situation, strategic planning should be focused on perfecting the EIA system, protecting the rights of public participation, establishing system of public interest litigation and strengthening environmental law enforcement system to strengthen the construction of government's environmental responsibility system. Thereby, it will help strengthen the environmental management, help the government to strengthen the legal awareness and will be beneficial to human survival and development.