How Is It Possible For Community Garbage Sorting Which There Is Environmental NGO Participates In?

Nowadays, environmental issues have gradually become one of the critical social problems affecting the development and progression of human society. In China, environmental NGOs are now the fastest growing with the largest number among all kinds of NGOs, and the number of environmental NGOs has reached 7881 in 2008 (’2013 environmental NGO report’).But nowadays, the participation of these organizations in community work is far from anticipation. In the field of sociology, a micro-level research on environmental NGOs taking part in environmental governance of urban community includes the study of social NGOs and community governance, etc. However, studies on environmental NGOs participating community environmental governance are not common.This article employs qualitative methods, taking the practice of NGO "A" participating in environment protection (garbage sorting) in residential area "G" as a case to study by carrying out field research. It uses the elements-framework of the political process model to analyze the process of environment NGOs attaining political opportunity and initiating community mobilization. Furthermore, this article also studies tactics and skills applied by NGOs when taking part in the governance of the community environment, explores significant meanings of NGOs participating in the community governance. The study found that the community garbage sorting, as an important part of community environmental governance motivated and advanced by the environmental organizations using professional measures in a long period, overcomes deficiencies of government’s unitary prompting and enhance the success of the community garbage sorting. Environmental NGOs work as an intermediary in community environment governance. They first obtain political opportunities in the interaction with the government in order to enter the communities so that they can give full play to their professional advantages to mobilize from community internal organizations/networks to community residents. Through such process, the governmental demands can be transformed into community needs, which could eventually lead to the enhancement of effects of the community environment governance.Theoretically, Through this study about garbage sorting, the author thinks noting that the hypothesis of rational man in the collective action theory and the undue emphasis on the group size during the collective actions could not sufficiently explain the community construction actions based on collective identity in China. It also points out that the transformation of cognitive liberation towards social movements in the political process model cannot be accomplished all at once, and’tactic’as an intermediary variable between cognition and actions should be given special attention in micro-level social movements. In practice, the author tries to explore the avenue to the success of garbage sorting in community, thinking that the combination of the support obtained from the government and environmental organizations’ own powerful mobilization in community will make the success of garbage sorting possible.