(Originally published on 06/22/2016)

On 20 June, UNDP China co-organized a multi-stakeholders’ consultation on Building a Platform of Common Knowledge for Environmental Rule of Law, with the China Biodiversity Conservation and Green Development Foundation (CBCGDF). The consultation aimed at bringing together key ENGOs to collectively reflect on how to best organize existing experiences to make key information available for all citizens, ENGOs and different stakeholders to participate in addressing common environmental challenges at a greater scale.

Under the new Environmental Protection Law, it is estimated that between 300-700 organisations might now technically qualify as plaintiffs for environmental public interest ligitation (EPIL). However, to date fewer than 10 environmental NGOs (ENGOs) have the technical, financial and human resource capacity to bring litigation themselves. A public platform is therefore proposed as one step to meet the capacity challenges.  

“In-depth discussions should be held on what information and knowledge should be prioritized, how existing tools could complement each other and what gaps remain to be filled,” stated Patrick Haverman, Deputy Country Director of UNDP China, speaking at the opening of the workshop. “In particular, in this exciting age of ‘Internet +’, to which sharing and connecting is the key, what innovative changes can be brought to public interest work remains to be explored.”

“It is one thing to make a law, and another to make the law work.” said Professor Dan Guttman, Project Technical Advisor of UNDP. Following his analysis of the US model of strengthening in-house capacity and collaboration between differing stakeholders and the EU model of building multiple levels of networks among ENGOs, Professor Guttman broke down the challenges of making environmental law work in China through his evaluation of multiple development projects. He further provided recommendations for creating a public platform to organize and share common “fact patterns” to help citizens and all ENGOs develop cases and generate “big data” for government to identify gaps for priority attention.

The consultation was attended by 20 representatives from national and local level environmental NGOs (ENGOs), academia, environmental engineering sector, and the IT industry.

The participants’ discussions confirmed the need to strengthen the coordination and knowledge-sharing between ENGOs at the national and local level in a systematic fashion, in order to empower citizens across the country to join the fight against pollution. It is hoped that the proposed platform can fulfill the demand collectively identified and truly bring together ENGOs to work towards developing China’s own model in safeguarding the environment through law.