Environmental NGO in China

Appearance of China's Environmental NGOs
Looking back in China, public awareness of environmental protection was weak for a long time.
The first environmental NGO was founded on March 31, 1994. At first it was named as the Academy for Green Culture, and now it is called Friends of Nature (FON).
After that more and more environmental NGOs appeared. Global Village of Beijing and Green Home, another two organisations established around 1996, now have become the top three environmental NGOS including FON. According to the data recorded in 2001, there were over 2,000 enviromental NGOs in China and millions of members at that time.
The effort of these NGOs was enormous. They woke up individuals’ awareness about protecting environment. And now more and more volunteers joined this big family. Zhang chunshan, an ordinary peasant living in Lijiang county of Yunnan Province, has devoted himself to the protection of the Chinese yew. In order to prevent pollution, a woman form Henan Province called Tian Guirong collected 50 tons of used batteries. And these kinds of examples are countless now.

Difficulties NGOs facing now
Like a tache between government and the enterprises, NGOs are now playing a more important role in the development of the country’s modernisation progress. On the other side, government’s attitude towards the environmental NGOs is very important to their development. The main three problems they facing now are:
1. Constraints in registration
According to one organiser’s words, she spent five years for registration and still had not been granted approval. Obstacles in registration procedures continue to cause frustration to those seeking to get on with the work for their NGO.
2. Limited funding
Most environmental NGOs now have no regularly incomes and their funding are mainly raised by volunteers. Therefore NGOs’ action and activity are highly districted.
3. Lack of influence
One sad fact is commercial activities like logging and trapping in China always deeply connected or started by government. And that why some environment find it is very hard to take further action.

Lessons from the history
1. Drawing on the experience of the West
According to the research, in the west countries people will divide environmental NGOs in a more specialise and narrow way. And this helps them to focus on their own field. and work more effectively. Furthermore, their structures are much more organised in order to provide a effectiveness working system.
2. Cooperation with government
Depending on the reality in China, the best way to running environment NGOs is building partnership with government. As we know that strong government support is the foundation to make rapid progress.

For a country with 1.3 billion people, the numbers of environmental NGOs and volunteers we have now are really small compared with the demand. Even though there is still a long way to go, but luckily China’s environmental NGOs have found their way and they will go further in the future.

For more information click here:
http://www.china.org.cn/environment/index.htm

Insight stakeholders from stakeholder mapping

Despite Grunig and Hunt’s (1984) situational theory of publics, there is still one theory widely used by PR people when dealing with stakeholders issues – Johnson and Scholes’s (2002) stakeholder mapping.

There are some factors when thinking about stakeholders mapping. Such as their potential influence on the organisation and therefore their profits, requirements, strengths and expectations all close connect with the organisation.

The Power – Interest map is very helpful for PR practitioners when distinguishing different stakeholders. With clear division it is easy to match label them in different grids. And this is critical for PR practitioners to choose varies strategies when facing varies groups. For people with highly interest but little power, what communicators need to do is let they informed. For people come with highly power but seems have few interests in this issue, keep them satisfied is fairly enough. It is no doubt that stakeholder with both high level of power and interest is the one who is connecting with the organisation deeply and managing it closely.

However one question showing up now– what should we do if both two groups have high powers but conflicting interests?

Reference:
Tench R. and Yeomans L., (2009). Exploring Public Relations. 2nd ed. Navarro: Pearson Education Limited. Audiences, stakeholders, publics: Choo G., P229-230.

Insight Stakeholders from Situational theory of publics

The stakeholders are people who have particular connection with the organisation, they can influence the company’s running and also affected by it. When looking into one company, their stakeholders including their employees, investors, customers, media and so on.

In Wikipedia’s explanation, the situational theory of publics defines that publics can be identified and classified in the context to which they are aware of the problem and the extent to which they do something about the problem. And now this theory is seen as a very practical technique for recognising publics as subjects

According to the theory, groups of latent publics connected with organisation unconsciously, aware publics realise the existence of issue or problem and active publics are highly involved in handling the issue or problem. Therefore it is very clear that the last two groups are the audience that PR practitioners need do things to.

Reference:
Tench R. and Yeomans L., (2009). Exploring Public Relations. 2nd ed. Navarro: Pearson Education Limited. Audiences, stakeholders, publics: Choo G., P230-231.