Exploring low-carbon pilot city policy implementation: evidence from China

ABSTRACT

China has established three rounds of low-carbon pilot city initiatives. However, a gap exists between policy making and successful implementation, and the effects on greenhouse gas (GHG) emission reduction were found to be different among pilots. This paper considers the question of how low-carbon policies in cities can be implemented effectively and how policy combinations are adopted for GHG emissions reduction. It uses a mixed research approach, including Qualitative Comparative Analysis (QCA) and field investigation in Pilot Y (situated in the southwest China). The results show that, first, financial support and monitoring systems are necessary conditions, while political leadership is a sufficient condition. This means that the absence of financial support or monitoring systems could lead to increased GHG emissions, while the presence of political leadership always promotes the reduction of GHG emissions but may not be sufficient on its own to achieve them. Second, the target responsibility system (TRS) – a system used by higher government levels to assess the policy implementation of lower government levels – and human resource mechanisms cannot effectively lead to the promotion of GHG emissions reduction. Finally, in the absence of TRS and human resource mechanisms, environmental information disclosure (EID) was found to effectively promote low-carbon urban development by encouraging public participation. This paper reveals the complexity of the implementation of low-carbon policies in cities, identifies the link between city-level and national action, and enriches the theoretical explanation of governance and low-carbon policy implementation gaps in China.

Key policy insights

• China’s low-carbon pilot city project is critical for reducing GHG emissions, however, the effects of the low-carbon pilot city programmes varied greatly.

• Financial support and monitoring systems are necessary conditions, while political leadership is a sufficient condition to achieve cities’ GHG emissions reduction goals.

• Local low-carbon development is limited and not put into practice at the city level in China, in part because of the absence of financial support and limited political attention.

• This study highlights the key conditions of organizational behaviour at the meso-level, and enriches the theoretical explanation of environmental policy implementation gaps in China.

KEYWORDS:

• GHG emissions
• low-carbon development
• environmental governance
• climate change
• policy implementation

Acknowledgments

I thank the Editors and anonymous referees for helpful comments and suggestions. I am grateful for helpful comments from Xuechun Wang.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 It is worth noting that all conditions in this study either exist or they do not, identifying them as binary discrete variables. However, the outcome, GHG emissions, can be a continuous variable. The reason why this paper treats the outcome also as a binary discrete variable is that in the published document, the NRDC study did not disclose the amount of GHG carbon emissions per capita of the samples, but only mentioned whether the per capita GHG emissions decreased.

2 The NRDC did not officially release the results to the public, but their team published the relevant assessment results. Readers can refer to the paper by Yang et al. (2018).

3 The Chinese version of the reports are available from the corresponding author.

4 QCA allows researchers to combine in-depth knowledge of cases with the ambition to identify conditions across cases (Li et al., 2016). The selection of conditions and the conceptualization of the outcome should occur via an iterative dialogue between prior theoretical knowledge and empirical insights gained during the research process (Schneider & Wagemann, 2012). That is, QCA is still essentially a qualitative method that relies on the author’s experience to identify key conditions that may affect the outcome, which is somewhat subjective and a highly controversial point of this method.

5 It needs to be explained that each condition should be independent of each other, in principle. Although the MS can provide GHG emissions data for TRS and EID, it does not affect local governments to conduct TRS and EID. On the one hand, local governments can use energy consumption as an assessment target, and, in fact, there are still many governments that do so, because they cannot know exactly their own GHG emissions data. On the other hand, the EID system is not only for GHG emission data disclosure; it also reflects the local governments’ transparency on the environmental management. Therefore, the author treats the MS as a separate condition from the TRS and EID.

6 Consistency provides a numerical expression for the degree to which empirical information deviates from a perfect subset relation. The consistency of a sufficient condition X for outcome Y be mathematically expressed by dividing the number of cases of a given outcome by all the cases that matter to measure sufficiency (Schneider & Wagemann, 2012).

7 A low-carbon development assessment of 110 Chinese major cities, jointly published by the Chinese Academy of Environmental Sciences and the Institute of Public and Environmental Affairs in 2021, showed that Shenzhen, Shanghai, and Ningbo ranked 2nd, 5th, and 19th, respectively. The report is available at: http://www.ipe.org.cn/reports/report_21452.html#.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by China Postdoctoral Science Foundation [grant number 2021M690275]; Beijing University of Technology Educational Research Project [grant number ER2022SZB04]; Collaborative Innovation Center for Emissions Trading System Co-constructed by the Province and Ministry [grant number 22CICETS-YB015].