Arthur P. J. Mo: The Environmental Information Disclosure Decree in China: a first implementation assessment

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 paper assesses the implementation of the environmental information disclosure system about six months after the Decree took effect on May 1, 2008 (and ±2 year after the Decree was published). Through reviewing the websites of all 31 provincial Environmental Protection Bureaus (EPBs) and the Ministry of Environment Protection, conducting an experiment with actual information disclosure request, and through interviews with all provincial level EPBs, this paper concludes 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 EPBs, and on strengthening the legal status of environmental information disclosure. Only then will this information disclosure policy be able to play an important role in industrial risk management.