Research on Public Participation and Information Publicity in Strategic Environmental Assessment

1 INTRODUCTIONStrategic Environmental Assessment (SEA) is the application of EIA(Environment Impact Assessment) to strategic actions such as policies, plans or programs (PPPs). More specially, SEA is: 'The formalized, systematic and comprehensive process of evaluating the environmental impacts of a policy, plan or program and its alternatives, including the preparation of a written report on the findings of that evaluation, and using the findings in publicly accountable decision-ma…

Research on Public Participation and Information Publicity in Strategic Environmental Assessment

It has been generally recognized that strategic environmental assessment integrates environment and development into decision-making and becomes an important decision-making tool for implementing sustainable development. This paper firstly introduces the relationships of SEA, public participation(PP)and information publicity(IP),then discusses the key parts in enforcing the effective process of PP: They are the methods for how to make sufficient information open (What), when to implement PP (When), who will determinate the public (Who), and how to make the models of PP (How). Six cases are compared and analyzed. At last, ways to improve the effectiveness of PP in China is also presented.