A DISCUSSION ON INSTITUTIONAL IMPROVEMENT FOR ECOLOGICAL CIVILIZATION AND LANDSCAPE GOVERNANCE IN CHINA

With the development of landscape discipline and governance theories, “landscape governance” has become a new frontier of inter-disciplinary research, and is considered a sub-topic and extension of “environmental governance.” Institution is an important factor to the development of landscape governance theory and practice. Since the Eighteenth National Congress of the Communist Party of China in 2012, the construction of Ecological Civilization has marked itself a new milestone for its systematic top-down design and institution-oriented efforts. At the same time, the Third Plenary Session of the Eighteenth Central Committee of the Communist Party of China in 2013 proposed to improve the contemporary national governance system and capacity, and took governance as a new means to evaluate state capacities and state-society relations. Both of them will significantly impact landscape planning, design, protection, and management in China. This article reviews the evolution of western landscape governance theories driven by 1) the emphasis on the spatial scale effect of landscape; 2) the exploration of the regional variety of cultural and collective identities of local landscapes; and 3) the emphasis on the practice of landscape governance. It also examines the opportunities in China’s landscape governance brought by the institutional improvement of Ecological Civilization, which might help: resolve the inherent conflicts that cause the existing environmental and ecological problems; enhance China’s capacity on landscape governance; establish a new land-use management system with a greater ecological security and broader ecosystem services; endow landscapes with more public benefits; cultivate a civil society and democracy in landscape governance; and, influence the education and research of Landscape Architecture in multiple dimensions. Finally, the article proposes roadmaps for China’s landscape governance at both global and national scales.