School of Public Administration, Nanjing University of Finance & Economics, Nanjing, Jiangsu, 210023, China.
School of Earth and Environmental Sciences, University of Queensland, Brisbane, QLD 4072, Australia.
J Environ Manage. 2019 Apr 1;235:51-61. doi: 10.1016/j.jenvman.2019.01.044. Epub 2019 Jan 19.
Solutions that effectively promote sustainable development in urban environments require an understanding of the complexity of human-environment interactions. This paper adopted a systems-based framework to understanding how social, organisational, and environmental factors interact within an urban system in China. Drawing upon a case study from the industrial city of Jinchang, it applied a qualitative bottom-up approach to understand these key factors operating from three perspectives: the commitment of stakeholders, institutional development and personal development of social systems. It revealed that decision-making mechanisms play a key role in improving the sustainability of governance, and that public-private cooperation and public participation are critical for innovative knowledge-based strategies. The key for improving institutional development is to reform the evaluation system of governance thus enhancing the capacities of decision and policy makers, and consequently improve the process of decision-making. Cultural and personal development are important soft power components that influence individual pro-environmental behaviour and performance toward sustainability. The results demonstrated how, in a Chinese context, the urban social system can be understood and urban sustainability can be promoted through environmental adaptation supported by joint efforts from governments, businesses, society and individuals. In this, China does not differ from other nations in spite of significant differences in cultural and political systems. This study contributed to a better understanding of complex urban systems, providing a bottom-up approach and knowledge for enhancing the adaptive capacity toward urban sustainability.
要有效促进城市环境的可持续发展，需要了解人类与环境相互作用的复杂性。本文采用基于系统的框架来理解社会、组织和环境因素如何在中国城市系统内相互作用。该文以工业城市金昌为例，采用自下而上的定性方法，从利益相关者的承诺、社会系统的制度发展和个人发展三个角度来理解这些关键因素。结果表明，决策机制在提高治理可持续性方面发挥着关键作用，公私合作和公众参与对于创新的基于知识的战略至关重要。改善制度发展的关键是改革治理的评估体系，从而增强决策者和政策制定者的能力，进而改善决策过程。文化和个人发展是影响个人环保行为和可持续性表现的重要软实力因素。研究结果表明，在中国，通过政府、企业、社会和个人的共同努力，在环境适应的支持下，城市社会系统可以得到理解，城市可持续性可以得到提升。在这方面，尽管中国在文化和政治制度方面存在显著差异，但与其他国家并无不同。本研究有助于更好地理解复杂的城市系统，提供了一种自下而上的方法和知识，以增强对城市可持续性的适应能力。
