Problem overview:
Awareness and visions:
Great pressure from the rapid growing population, deteriorating environment and depleting resources has badly constrained further development of China's economy and improvement of people's living quality. In view of this serious situation, in 1986, the Chinese government began to explore a way of establishing experimental community for sustainable development.
Policies and measures:
Following such great visionary for sustainable communities various action programs have been successfully carried out to improve community living quality, protect the natural resources and wildlife, utilize renewable energy and so on.
Background in summary:
Objectives and achievements of experimental communities: Experimental communities have the prime objective to develop sustainable mechanisms to balance economic development, social development, and environment. So far, they have achieved promising progress in the following aspects:
- Integrated Planning: Establishment of a Leading Group and an affiliated office to engage in the formulation of China's Agenda 21.
- Renewable energy utilization: Including biomass, wind and solar energy.
- Green food production: Becoming beneficial and popular.
- Waste reclamation: Aimed at industrialized waste management.
- Sustainable community management: Emphasizing standards of Greenness, Quietness, Beauty, Safety.
- Ecosystem restoration: Increasing of reservation zones, rare and wild species are highly protected. Environmental monitoring and impact assessments are being conducted.
Outputs: Currently, there are 69 sustainable communities across the country at all levels. These communities have provided a good foundation for China's Local Agenda 21 to achieve sustainable development.
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Good practice rating:
(1 for the best, 5 for the lowest score) |
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Sustainability
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Efficiency
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| 2 |
 Improvement in either the environment of economic condition with no harm to the other. |
3 |
Cost efficient. |
| 3 |
Sustainable over time (not one-off) |
Process |
| Adaptability |
2 |
Participation of the community |
| 2 |
Location adaptability (can the project be done in other places?) |
2 |
Participation of resource owners/users |
| 2 |
Socio-cultural adaptability. |
2 |
Partnerships between various actors (Governments, NGO, Academia, Private) |
| 2 |
Level of development adaptability. |
- |
Degree of coordination and cooperation between government departments. |
| 2 |
Style of government adaptability. |
- |
Ability to attract political interest/support |
| 2 |
Degree of decentralization adaptability. |
- |
Procedures for feedback and review. |
Comments on this example:
- Very good concept in achieving sustainable development. However, the example does not provide information on how the communities were motivated to do so, the interventions of the government, the benefits they received etc,
- Promoting integrated economic planning and environmental management in community levels helps provide an important base of experience and practice for the implementation of sustainable development strategy at local level, and further on to national level.
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Sustainability of the project:
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Awareness and visions: It is interesting to see how China has successfully implemented the concept of sustainable community, and as a matter of fact doing successfully well. According to the context in this example, China has been successful in implementing programmes that have increased the number of sustainable communities, the number of preserved forest and decreased the rate of pollution.
However, the sustainable community program does require a lot of dedication from the people involved and assistance from the government. It is most likely that without the assistance from these institutes, it would be hard for the communities to actually initiate such programs by themselves.
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Adaptability of the project to other situations:
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The experimental sustainable community program could be adapted to other communities in other countries as well. One example of adaptability of sustainable community is the forest community, in which a forest community is one kind of sustainable community, but only being carried out in communities that are located in and/or around the forests boundaries.
| Process of decision making and implementation: |
Policies and measures:
Various programs have been implemented in accordance to the experimental sustainable community program to improve the standard of living, while maintaining and/or improving environmental and natural resources conditions. Some programs require technical expertise such as the Energy Utilization program, or the Green Food Production program. Some other programs require the enactment of government policies such as the Ecosystem Restoration program. Hence, these programs could not be initiated at the community level instead, the government has to take much action in providing communities with technical advice and financial support in order to start these programs going.
Cost efficient:
Although the experimental sustainable community program has achieved so much success, but surely the majority of the programs would not have been possible without financial support. It also happens that most of the projects are huge and sophisticated projects, such as, waste reclamation or energy utilization and would probably require a lot of money to keep it going. Therefore, the experimental sustainable community might not be very cost efficient since so much money is needed to keep it running.
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Documentation: |
Literature or other written project review references
Chinas Experimental Sustainable Community Website http://www.acca21.edu.cn/indexe11.html
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Source of Information: |
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Contacts: |
The Administrative Office for China's Experimental Sustainable Communities
109 Wangquanhe Road, Haidian District
Beijing China 100080
Phone: 86-10-62588135
Fax: 62588127
E-mail: zhangjc@acca21.edu.cn
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Submitted by: |
Mr. Chen Yuxiang
Deputy Director
The Administrative Centre for China's Agenda 21
Beijing, China
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