In the name of “low-carbon cities”: National rhetoric, local leverage, and divergent exploitation of the greening of urban governance in China

ABSTRACT

The imaginary significance of cities to address the climate change crisis seems to have no ceiling. But the outcomes of urban climate governance have fallen short of the high promise placed on cities to contribute climate solutions. This research examines the widely observed gap between the highly expected role of cities in climate control and the disappointing reality from a perspective of the environmental state. Through a comparative study of two low-carbon city (LCC) experiments in Shenzhen and Huizhou, as well as an analysis of nation-wide administrative legal disputes related to decarbonization issues, this paper identifies an interesting legitimacy space created and manipulated locally along with the emergence of a carbon-focused environmental nation-state. Four rationales, namely carbon re-regulation, carbon formalization, carbon rationalization, and carbon exceptionalism, are identified underpinning different urban actors’ articulation and leverage of the national priority of decarbonization to advance their respective agendas. Success or failure of urban climate experiments is found to be contingent upon the effective management and mediation of different rationales, giving rise to a distinctive process of “localizing the low-carbon state.” The findings of this research shed light on the multifaceted effects of the greening state on the urban politics of climate change.

KEYWORDS:

• Urban climate governance
• environmental state
• low-carbon city
• local climate politics
• climate experimentation

Acknowledgments

We thank the journal editor and three anonymous reviewers for their constructive suggestions on the revision of this paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Correction Statement

This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1. A detailed description of the selection method and process can be found in Appendix I in the supplementary materials.

2. The Low-Carbon Province/City Pilot Program was initiated in 2010 by the National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC), which had been the central agency responsible for climate policymaking before the authority shifted to the Ministry of Ecology and Environment in 2018. To the point of this study, the NDRC had designated three batches (2010, 2012, 2017) of Low-Carbon Province/City Pilots in 6 provinces and 81 cities/counties.

3. The information of interviewees can be found in Appendix II in the supplementary materials.

4. Personal communication, Interviewee 33, May 9, 2017.

5. Personal communication, Interviewee 29, December 16, 2015.

6. http://www.gov.cn/xinwen/2021-03/13/content_5592681.htm, last retrieved on March 1, 2021.

7. In 2011, the central government initiated a pilot program to authorize the cities of Beijing, Shanghai, Tianjin, Chongqing and Shen and the provinces of Guangdong and Fujian to establish municipal/provincial carbon emissions exchange platform and to formulate local operational policies.

8. Personal communications, Interviewee 11, June 23, 2015; Interviewee 12, June 24, 2015; Interviewee 18, July 20, 2015; Interviewee 29, December 16, 2015.

9. Personal communication, Interviewee 12, June 24, 2015.

10. Personal communication, Interviewee 8, June 18, 2015.

11. Personal communication, Interviewee 4, June 9, 2015.

12. Personal communication, Interviewee 24, August 5, 2015.

13. Same as 13.

14. Legal case (2018) 粤行终577号.

15. Same as 10.

16. Same as 15.

17. Personal communication, Interviewee 25, August 11, 2015.

Additional information

Funding

The work described in this article was sponsored by the grants received from the Research Grants Council of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region (GRF #17610321 and # 17614218) and the Outstanding Researcher Award 2020-21 of the University of Hong Kong.

Notes on contributors

George C. S. Lin

George C. S. Lin is a Chair Professor of Geography at the University of Hong Kong. He is the author of Red Capitalism in South China: Growth and Development of the Pearl River Delta, Developing China: Land, Politics, and Social Conditions, coauthor of China’s Urban Space: Development under Market Socialism, and over 90 articles published in internationally refereed journals and books. His research interests include China’s urban development and urbanization, land use and land management, the growth of urbanism, rural industrialization and regional development in the Pearl River Delta, transnationalism, cross-border population mobility, and the geography of Chinese diaspora.

Yunjing Li

Yunjing Li is a Post-Doctoral Fellow in the Department of Geography at the University of Hong Kong. She received her Master and PhD degrees from the Urban Planning program at Columbia University in the city of New York. Before that she attended Tsinghua University and graduated with a Bachelor of Architecture. Yunjing’s research interest is situated at the intersections of (1) urban climate and sustainability policy and planning, (2) China’s urban development, and (3) environmental politics and governance issues. Her work has also been published in Journal of Planning Education and Research, Environment and Planning C: Politics and Space, and Housing Studies.