School of Environment and Natural Resources, Renmin University of China, Beijing 100872, China.
J Environ Sci (China). 2010;22(10):1649-56. doi: 10.1016/s1001-0742(09)60302-8.
China's 2007 Open Government Information Regulations is widely considered as a milestone in the country's information policy history and is praised as a "sunshine program". The Environmental Information Disclosure Decree was the first to operationalize these general regulations into a sectoral information disclosure system on environment. This study assessed the implementation of the environmental information disclosure system about six months after the Decree took effect on May 1, 2008. Through reviewing the websites of all 31 provincial Environmental Protection Bureaus and the Ministry of Environmental Protection, conducting an experiment with actual information disclosure request, and through interviews with all provincial Environmental Protection Bureaus, this article concluded that the implementation of the environmental information disclosure system still falls short. Future improvements should focus on further publicity of the regulations and decree to enhance public participation, the establishment of an independent evaluation and supervision system for information disclosure, the exchange of experiences and best practices among provincial Environmental Protection Bureaus, and on strengthening the legal status of environmental information disclosure.
中国的 2007 年《政府信息公开条例》被广泛认为是该国信息政策史上的一个里程碑，并被誉为“阳光计划”。《环境信息公开条例》率先将这些一般规定转化为环境领域的部门信息公开制度。本研究在 2008 年 5 月 1 日《条例》生效六个月后评估了环境信息公开制度的实施情况。通过审查所有 31 个省级环境保护局和环境保护部的网站，进行实际信息公开请求的实验，并通过采访所有省级环境保护局，本文得出结论，环境信息公开制度的实施仍有不足之处。未来的改进应侧重于进一步宣传法规和条例，以增强公众参与，建立独立的信息公开评估和监督制度，交流省级环境保护局之间的经验和最佳做法，并加强环境信息公开的法律地位。
