Research On The Mechanism Of Prevention And Cure Of Environmental Social Conflicts

With the implementation of the reform and opening-up policy from 1978, rapid developments have taken place in Chinese economy. China has made remarkable achievements and grown into the world's second largest economy. However, Chinese people not only enjoy material prosperity and social progress due to the economy development, but also faced with the consequences of the extensive economic growth mode. In recent years, many hot words, such as Haze, Water Pollution, Solid Waste Pollution are frequently appeared on the Internet and Newspapers, Social conflicts due to environmental issues are also occurred more and more frequently. According to China Legal Report 2014 released by the CASS Institute, the social conflicts which includes more than one hundred people are in total of 871, 40 percent of which are caused by the environmental problems. From 2010 to 2012 are the highest period. Environmental Social Conflicts have led to some public disorders and insecurity, which has highlighted the crisis of social governance in China.This paper is pointed to Environmental Social Conflicts. Firstly, compares the social conflicts and NIMBY to define the concept and connotation of it. And then, two different conflicts happened on Shifang, Sichuan Province and Maoming, Guangdong Province which was against for PX are mentioned to explore the process of evolution of typical Environmental social Conflicts. The last step is sorting out the general evolution process, which is divided into three stages, they are before, during and after. What's more, there exists a critical point between rational protest and violent protest on the second stage.Next, Based on the theory of embeddedness, this paper analyzes the causes of environmental social conflicts and the related preventive measures to contain the conflicts by focusing on the three major parties concerned which are the local government, the enterprises and the community residents. The three major parties have different recognitions and reactions to the same environmental issues and different interests preference in the policy-making process in view of their own social networks and inner relations causing information flow barrier which further results in the crisis of trust. At last, the Environmental Social Conflicts broke out.Therefore, this paper proposes that the key measures to prevent environmental social conflicts is to keep the interest balance among the three major parties and construct a trust mechanism to make the three understand one another, including interpersonal trust, information-sharing trust and interest stakeholders' mutual trust. Finally, the related preventive measures based on the Prevention Mechanism are proposed to deal with Environmental Social Conflicts.