Journal of Environmental Management 290 (2021) 112622

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Journal of Environmental Management

journal homepage: http://www.elsevier.com/locate/jenvman

Research article

Environmental governance for sustainable development in Asia

Wanxin Li a, *, Jose A. Puppim de Oliveira b
a
School of Energy and Environment City University of Hong Kong, Kowloon, Hong Kong SAR, China
b
Getulio Vargas Foundation (FGV/EAESP and FGV/EBAPE), Av. 9 de julho, 2029, Bela Vista, São Paulo, SP, CEP 01313-902, Brazil

A R T I C L E I N F O A B S T R A C T

Keywords: Because of the size of its population and economy, good environmental governance in Asia is fundamental not
Pollution only for the well-being of the region’s population but also for the health of the planet. This article introduces the
SDGs challenges of governing the environment in Asia. The issue evaluates the outcomes and institutional changes in
Policy instrument
selected countries related to substantive environmental issues such as air pollution, water quality, municipal
Stakeholder analysis
solid waste, transport, land use, and climate change. By synthesizing the main research issues, methodology and
Governance
Climate Change findings of the growing literature on the region, we highlight the trends in environmental governance and gaps in
Asia policy and research. Despite the efforts made, there are still remaining environmental governance challenges to
China be addressed by both the academics and practitioners in Asia.

1. Introduction society in decision making.

In this text, we analyze the main trends in environmental governance
in Asia in the last half century. Good environmental governance in Asia
is not only desirable for the well-being of the region’s population but
also necessary for achieving the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)
(United Nations 2015) globally. Asia hosts more than half of the world’s
population and is responsible for larger part of the pollution generated
worldwide. The economy of the continent has grown at a rapid pace
bringing in all the benefits in terms of human development, but also
generating a series of side effects for the local and global population.
Countries in the region have faced tremendous environmental chal­
lenges in the past, such as drastic levels of industrial pollution in Japan
in the 1960s and 1970s, generating terrible health problems such as
Minamata disease and Yokkaichi asthma (Puppim de Oliveira, 2011).
More recently, Asian urban areas, particularly Chinese, Indian and
Pakistani cities, have ranked among the most polluted cities in the
world. The top 50 cities with the worst air quality in 2019 are all in Asia
(IQAir 2020). A third of global air pollution deaths occurred in Asia and
the Pacific (UNEP 2019). In terms of emissions, the region, including its
Middle Eastern countries, contributed to more than half of the global
carbon emissions and had 8 countries among the top 10 emitters in 2018
(GCP 2020). However, environmental institutions in the region have
evolved in the last decades with a series of improvements in governance
and instruments for environmental regulation, including generation of
environmental information, transparency and participation of civil
Nevertheless, despite the advances, there are many areas that need
improvements as synergies are lacking across different social actors,
between levels of government and/or jurisdictions, across sectors, and
among policy instruments. Based on the papers in the Virtual Special
Issue (VSI) and the broad literature on the topic, we identify the main
improvements and innovations in environmental governance in the re­
gion. Even though they do not cover many countries or all Asian regions,
they can provide good analyses of the challenges and the evolution of
environmental governance across Asia, as the countries that have not
been covered face similar issues. We have witnessed a series of changes
in the way the countries in the region govern air pollution (Zhang et al.,
2018; Popović 2020), water management ( Wang et al., 2019), solid
waste management (Puppim de Oliveira, 2019), transportation (H.
Wang et al., 2018), land use (Yew and Zhu 2019), and climate change
(Puppim de Oliveira, 2019; Jia et al. 2018). Mechanisms of governance
have changed with new forms of bridging government levels (Puppim de
Oliveira, 2019), the hybrid of hierarch and market (Guttman et al.,
2018), and networks (Wang et al., 2019; G. Li et al., 2018).
Thus, environmental governance in Asia has made some steps for­
ward in the last decades, but still needs significant advances in order to
contributing to the achievement of the SDGs. In the next sections, we
analyze how the interest in environmental governance and sustainable
development has grown in the last decades based on the published
materials. We start with a review based on a bibliometric analysis. Then
we discuss the main changes in environmental governance in the region,

* Corresponding author.
E-mail addresses: wanxin.li@cityu.edu.hk (W. Li), jose.puppim@fgv.br (J.A. Puppim de Oliveira).

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jenvman.2021.112622
Received 20 September 2020; Received in revised form 14 March 2021; Accepted 11 April 2021
Available online 28 April 2021
0301-4797/© 2021 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
W. Li and J.A. Puppim de Oliveira
based on the articles in this special issues and the literature. Finally, we
conclude with suggestions on the potential agenda for research in the
short and medium term.
2. A bibliometric analysis of sustainability challenges and
environmental governance in Asia
Because of its global importance, unsurprisingly, sustainability issues
in Asia have drawn growing attention from both academics and prac­
titioners. Applying the search string (“sustainability” or “sustainable
development”) and (“Asia” or “China”) in title, abstract, or keywords in
Web of Science and Scopus, we obtained 18,239 and 28,637 results for
1992–2020, respectively, on July 10, 2020. After having removed the
12,295 duplicated results and 147 from the year of 2020, there are a
total of 35,410 publications remaining. From 41 in 1992 to 4608 in
2019, the number of publications has been increasing by 20.32%
annually, on average (Fig. 1). The total number of results found in the
Journal of Environmental Management (JEMA) is 195, ranked no. 17 out
of the total of 8497 different sources, with an average annual growth
rate at 18.11%, of a similar magnitude as the aggregated whole body of
scientific production.
Surrounding those thematic sustainability challenges, different as­
pects have been discussed in the JEMA articles. Fig. 2 illustrates the
relative frequency of the occurrences of the keywords. Besides in­
dicators, biodiversity, eco-efficiency, and greenhouse gases, other the­
matic issues such as urbanization, land use, conservation, ecosystem
services, system dynamics, carrying capacity, wastewater treatment,
water quality, air pollution, carbon sequestration, carbon dioxide
emissions, climate change, and resilience are also discussed. The liter­
ature is heavily biased towards China, as it is the largest country and has
the largest number of scholars. In terms of methodology adopted, the
following are popular choices, statistical analysis, data envelopment
analysis, economic analysis, scenario analysis, emergy evaluation, and
optimization. As to environmental governance, only policies and co-
management are somehow discussed, both illustrated only by very
small sized fonts in Fig. 2, indicating a relatively low level of attention
paid to by scholars, compared with other keywords.
Our Virtual Special Issue (VSI) fills the gap in the existing JEMA
articles, by adding the much needed discussions on the institutions in
environmental governance for sustainable development in Asia, i.e. the
rules of the game that governments and society develop to deal with
various environmental issues. The management of air, water, municipal
solid waste, transport, and climate change are the substantive topics of
Fig. 1. Number of scientific production available in Web of Science and Scopus, on sustainability of sustainable development in Asia, 1992–2019.
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Journal of Environmental Management 290 (2021) 112622
the nine contributing articles. Four contributing articles examine the
institutional set up including landscape of actors, what roles they have
played and their interactions (Guttman et al., 2018; Puppim de Oliveira,
2019; Puppim de Oliveira and Doll, 2016; Popović 2020; G. Li et al.,
2018). They found non-state actors have exercised their agency,
involved themselves in policy advocacy, implementation, and impact
creation. Within the different institutional contexts, system design fea­
tures are also discussed, including the allocation of rights and re­
sponsibilities among different actors (Popović 2020), between different
levels of the government (Puppim de Oliveira, 2019), and between
governments of a same level but of different jurisdictions (Wang et al.,
2019). The findings reinforce the strengths of alternative governance
modes that are network-based or polycentric in forming effective col­
lective actions in addressing complex sustainability challenges (Dietz
et al. 2003; Duit and Galaz 2008; Ostrom 2010).
Lastly, not taking a static view, policy change, including agents and
processes of change is discussed (Popović 2020; Puppim de Oliveira,
2019; Guttman et al., 2018; Zhang et al., 2018; Yew and Zhu 2019; G. Li
et al., 2018). Not only academia, policy makers have become extremely
interested in the theories of change and exploring how to make changes
happen toward improved sustainability. For example, the OECD Envi­
ronmental Performance Review exercises build peer learning in the
formal review processes (W. Li and Mauerhofer 2016). Thus, our VSI has
added efforts in this direction.
3. Changes in Environmental Governance in Asia
Environmental governance in Asia, as in other parts of the world,
have changed significantly in the last decades. The pursuit of unlimited
economic growth prevailed for decades, but the development path of the
region has been adjusted to the demand of markets and civil society for a
more sustainable development, as well as the growing capacity of gov­
ernments to regulate social and environmental issues. Over the years,
different kinds of environmental governance regimes took root in the
region, building the institutions that have shaped the responses to the
rapid uncontrolled environmental degradation of the past (Harashima
2000). The model of economic development at all costs of the past has
switched to a more balanced development model, where social and
environmental concerns have gained more weight in the decisions
(ESCAP et al., 2016). On the political side, there has been less centrality
in the governments, particularly national governments, to drive envi­
ronmental changes. The actors in the environmental governance re­
gimes have become more diverse. Although governments are still the
W. Li and J.A. Puppim de Oliveira
Fig. 2. Cloud of frequently referred words in the JEMA articles.
most relevant stakeholders in the environmental governance regimes in
most countries in the region, civil society and subnational governments
have become important actors in shaping decisions. Countries have also
become part of larger international environmental governance regimes
for regulation of different environmental issues, from climate change to
biodiversity and transboundary pollution. International organizations,
including private companies and NGOs, have influenced domestic
environmental governance regimes.
Based on the papers of the virtual special issue and the broad liter­
ature, we have been able to identify a few trends in environmental
governance in Asia in the last years.
There have been an increasing participation of civil society and
nonstate actors in the governance systems in many countries, such as
China and Malaysia, where nonstate groups have interacted with gov­
ernments in tackling problems of waste and pollution (Guttman et al.,
2018; Puppim de Oliveira, 2019). Different from most of the Western
countries, where the environmental movement started by the civil so­
ciety, the State in Asia has had a dominating role in environmental
governance. Governments, particularly national governments have
determined most of the environmental agenda in Asia, while in Western
countries, the Civil Society Organizations (CSOs) and
Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs) drove and still drive the
environmental agenda. Moreover, the nonstate organizations that have
increasingly influenced environmental governance in Asia are not the
same kind of organizations in the Western countries, and their methods
are also different. For example, nonstate organizations in countries like
China have no similar in the West. Those organizations are not
completely independent from the government, both in terms of re­
sources and autonomy (Guttman et al., 2018). Most nonstate organiza­
tions work together with “mainstream” governmental organizations.
Even international NGOs with branches in China have close links with
the government.
The actions and influences of nonstate organizations are also
different from that of the West. Confrontational tactics, such as protests
and anti-government or anti-businesses campaigns, often used by CSOs
in the Western countries, are rarely used by Asian nonstate actors. On
the one hand, many governments in Asian countries would be less
willing to allow confrontational dissent from civil society, what would
put individuals at risk of being arrested and endure tough punishment.
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Journal of Environmental Management 290 (2021) 112622
On the other hand, confrontational attitude is not a typically accepted
behavior in certain countries with Confucian traditions, which values a
more consensual kind of decision making, even though there have been
several violent protests in the region, including in China (He 2018).
Thus, the activity of nonstate actors in Asia tends to be more collabo­
rative with the government, also because large part of the nonstate or­
ganizations is influenced by governments. Thus, different tactics are
used to influence policymaking and implementation. For example,
environmental advocacy groups in China rely on two main strategies to
gain direct access to policy making: Bringing in resources such as
knowledge or financial assets; and lobbying government actors from
outside to steer policy (Popović 2020). The changes in governance in
Asia have been accelerated by the rise of information and communica­
tion technologies (ICT), particularly social media. CSOs or individuals
have used the social media to organize around environmental issues,
expose environmental problems and demand policy changes. Social
media has allowed the growth of the voice of nonstate actors.
The arrangements among actors have also evolved in the last decades
with impacts on environmental governance in Asia. Different arrange­
ments among governmental and nongovernmental actors have emerged
over the years. The centralized, sometimes authoritarian, top-down
approach to deal with environmental issues has become more decen­
tralized and participatory. This has brought wider support from various
groups for improvement in the environmental quality and also led to a
series of innovative initiatives across the region. Different from the
Western democracies, where social and technological environmental
innovation emerges from the interactions between government, private
sector and civil society, Asian more authoritarian governments have
developed its own way to innovate in policymaking. The idea of social
control permeates many governments in the region and participation
takes place with a close interaction between governmental and nonstate
actors, where independent voice and action is limited, nevertheless with
some good results. For example, governments have relied on the support
of nonstate actors to regulate heavy polluters in China and Malaysia.
Nongovernmental organizations contribute with issue entrepreneurship,
moving the agenda with close interactions with regulatory agencies,
moving back-and-forth between collaboration and dispute (Yew and
Zhu 2019). As environmental issues become more complex, requiring
multi-level and multi-sector approach, networks and horizontal
W. Li and J.A. Puppim de Oliveira
coordination among a large set of actors in government have been
developed in the region in countries like India, China and Malaysia
(Wang et al., 2019; Puppim de Oliveira and Doll, 2016). Networks have
been able to engage local authorities and civil society organizations in
the implementation of environmental policies. For example, financing
networks have been able to boost implementation of eco-compensation
schemes in Chinese rivers (Wang et al., 2019). The role of central gov­
ernment to bridge governments upstream and downstream of the rivers
has created capacity and facilitated the joint policymaking to build ef­
forts to clean up rivers with innovative compensation mechanisms.
Finally, decentralization has been a trend across the sectors in the re­
gion. Central governments have moved policy responsibilities and re­
sources to lower levels of government. Nevertheless there is a weakness
in intergovernmental relations and fragmentation of responsibilities,
such as the case of climate change and waste management in Malaysia
(Puppim de Oliveira, 2019). The decentralization process has been
reversed in some cases with a recentralization, such as waste manage­
ment in Malaysia, because of lack of capacity in local governments.
Capacity building efforts were necessary before the decentralization.
Changes in environmental governance in Asia have resulted in the
use of new environmental mechanisms and instruments. The central role
of the state in Asia moved from an emphasis in the utilization of
command-and-control for environmental regulation to a mix of in­
struments, including economic instruments, such as environmental
taxes, payment for ecosystem services and environmental markets. For
example, Malaysia has long used pollution fees for reducing water
pollution from the palm oil industry, being one of the pioneering ini­
tiatives of this kind worldwide (Visvanathan and Tiong 1999). Several
other countries have now experimented with different kinds of
payment-for-ecosystem services (PES). China particularly has intro­
duced a series of PES, from air to water pollution. The country has tested
various eco-compensation system, arguably leading the world in the use
of economic instruments in recent times. For example, innovative
eco-compensation systems have taken place in watersheds, where up­
stream potential polluters are compensated to restrain the economic
activities with payments from downstream areas that use the water from
the river, such as the schemes in Zhejiang and Fujian provinces (Wang
et al., 2019).
The Asian region has been innovative in the development of envi­
ronmental markets, particularly experimenting with carbon markets.
Tokyo Metropolitan Government was the first carbon market established
at the city level, which includes buildings, with significant reduction in
emissions in the first years (Roppongi et al. 2017). China has developed
several carbon markets at the subnational level, in a move to create a
national carbon market. There are several opportunities for cost savings
for the reduction of carbon emissions, particularly from industries (Xian
et al., 2020).
The transparency of environmental information has strengthened the
governance of the environmental regime for controlling polluting ac­
tivities. There have been several initiatives to make environmental in­
formation available to the public. The openness for participation in
decision making and implementation in Asia has created opportunities
for advocacy groups and networks of organizations and individuals to
use environmental information, which could result in more enforcement
of the existing regulations and pressure to strengthen the control over
polluters (W. Li, Liu, and Li 2012; X. Wang et al., 2019; Yew and Zhu
2019). Governments in Asia have also traditionally interacted with
scientists for decision making. There is a tradition in some countries,
such as Japan and China, to consult specialists or create expert com­
missions to get advice for policy making. In Hong Kong, one of the
largest ports in the world, policy-makers and scientists interacted over a
decade, with participation of the private sector, to design policy and
legislation to control pollution from shipping with positive results
(Zhang et al., 2018).
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Journal of Environmental Management 290 (2021) 112622
4. Future research and challenges for environmental
governance in Asia
Despite of the tremendous advancements in environmental gover­
nance in Asia in the last decades, there is still a long way to go before
countries are able to manage all range of environmental issues. Many
challenges still remain.
There is an increasing demand of resources with continuing rapid
development. The Covid-19 crisis in 2020 has slowed down economic
growth but the region is expected to grow rapidly in the next years,
particularly in countries with large populations such as India, Pakistan,
China, Indonesia and Vietnam (OECD 2020). The big jump in the de­
mand from natural resources can cause a series of local and global im­
pacts if more effective environmental governance mechanisms are not
established. The pace of changes should be accelerated to decouple
economic development and improvements in social wellbeing from
environmental degradation. Successful policy change and environ­
mental advocacy can come from within the government hierarchy itself
(Puppim de Oliveira, 2019)or external pressure exerted by environ­
mental NGOs and the public (Popović 2020; Yew and Zhu 2019).
Innovative and sometimes progressive policy measures take into
consideration the distribution of costs and benefits among different
stakeholders and work out win-win arrangements to be able to inter­
nalize environmental costs and incentivize resource conservation (Wang
et al., 2019), recycling (Puppim de Oliveira, 2019), pollution (Zhang
et al., 2019) and carbon emissions reduction (H. Wang et al., 2018).
Those findings indicate the importance of the marriage between science
and policy and also the combination of top-down and bottom-up ap­
proaches to build a healthy environmental policy eco-system for effi­
cient and effective environmental governance, and enhanced
government responsiveness and accountability. Thus, further research is
needed in understanding combinations of actors in Asian context that
strengthen collaboration and joint efforts to bring successful environ­
mental management and greener growth. There is also a need to expand
the research efforts to understand the situation in countries on which we
have scarce literature.
The process of changes in environmental governances needs to
continue with improvements in decision making through participation
of civil society organizations (CSOs) and scaling up of the innovative
policy mechanisms, such as economic instruments and information ac­
cess. Networking and collaboration between levels of governments have
facilitated such innovations even in authoritarian contexts. Continuing
processes of institutional change (e.g., decentralization) can gradually
make better environmental governance with more inputs from local
actors and collaborative arrangements for co-production of environ­
mental initiatives. Those changes help society embark on the path to­
wards greener growth, by revealing and mainstreaming sustainability
preferences in policy-making and consumer decision making.
Furthermore, the region has still several environmental governance
challenges that are under researched. Air and water pollution are still on
the rise in some countries (IQAir 2020). Old basic environmental issues
with large implications on health, such as indoor air pollution, are still
problematic in countries like India (Ahmad and Puppim de Oliveira
2015). Asian countries are still slow to develop strategies to deal with
climate change adaptation. The region includes some of the most
vulnerable countries to climatic events, such as Bangladesh, Pakistan
and the Philippines.
Finally, the region is weakly integrated in terms of cooperative
mechanisms ((ESCAP et al., 2016)), and those in place have not devel­
oped strong governance mechanisms and tangible outcomes, such as in
Northeast Asia (Komori 2010; Otsuka 2018). Environmental governance
could be improved by strengthening the cooperation to address regional
and global problems, such as climate change, transboundary air pollu­
tion or yellow dust, as well as local environmental issues such waste
management. There are several initiatives for bilateral cooperation even
among cities (Kurniawan et al., 2013), but there is little cooperation at
W. Li and J.A. Puppim de Oliveira
the regional level with broad governance mechanisms. Asian environ­
mental cooperation is less institutionalized and more of networked kind
of regionalism. Indeed, formalization of environmental cooperation
seems to have constrained instead of promoted regionalism in Southeast
Asia (Elliott 2011).
The key message is that there is no one-size-fits-all solution to
different environmental challenges in different geo-political and socio­
economic contexts such as Asia. The challenges and potential solutions
have also changed over time. The articles presented in this special issue
derived lessons on the provision of public environmental goods, based
on an international and comparative approach. The continuing
engagement of the academic community in researching how environ­
mental governance has evolved overtime is fundamental to under­
standing the unique governance regimes of the region and best way to
improve them.
Credit author statement
Both authors Wanxin Li and Jose A. Puppim de Oliveira share the
responsibilities of developing the VSI Environmental Governance in
Asia. Both authors contribute equally to the conceptualization, Meth­
odology, Formal analysis and writing the manuscript.
Declaration of competing interest
The authors declare that they have no known competing financial
interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence
the work reported in this paper.
Acknowledgements
We thank the Editor, Professor Berrin Tansel and the contributing
authors for making this virtual special issue happen. We thank Damni
Tejani for the wonderful research assistance. Financial support from the
Research Grants Council of Hong Kong (project 9042115 & 9042611) is
gratefully acknowledged.
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