Environmental policy innovations in China: a critical analysis from a low-carbon city

ABSTRACT

The Chinese state is squarely ‘back’ in the business of environmental governance with an increasing number of policy innovations or experiments to resolve environmental issues. These have been mostly enacted through the ‘experimentation under hierarchy’ framework, undergirded by compensation-for-performance incentive structures for local agents. Based on on-site ethnography in local China, a critical analysis is presented of low-carbon city policy experiments – one of the most prominent environmental policies introduced in the past decade. Using lessons from the agency theory, it is hypothesized that outcomes of these policy innovations are contingent on different policy dimensions. Although a number of positive outcomes have been achieved in output-oriented dimensions, the fundamental difficulty of specifying all aspects of complex, multidimensional work tasks involved in low-carbon city development has frequently led to policy unmaking. The findings raise important questions about China’s tendency to rely excessively on compensation-for-performance structures to promote environmental policies.

KEYWORDS:

• Environmental policy innovation
• agency theory
• local governance
• environmental governance
• low-carbon city
• China

Acknowledgments

I thank Edward Steinfeld, Jonas Nahm, Nick Smith, Genia Kostka, Sarah Eaton, Alex Wang, Scott Wilson, Benjamin Van Rooij, and three anonymous reviewers for comments on earlier iterations of this manuscript, which has also benefited immensely from comments and feedback from many participants at the 2016 German Association for Social Science Research on China (DGA ASC) Joint International Conference in Bochum and at the 2017 Association for Asian Studies (AAS) Annual Conference in Toronto. Research was generously supported by the U.S. Department of Education, Institute of International Education, Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, U.S. National Security Education Program, U.S. Department of State, Blakemore Foundation, and The MIT-Japan International Studies Fund. These institutions do not represent or endorse the views and findings presented in this manuscript. All errors are mine alone.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. See, e.g. (O’Rourke 2004) in the case of Vietnam.

2. See http://epi.yale.edu/ for detailed data.

3. See http://www.uncsd2012.org/index.php?page=view&type=99&nr=245&menu=20. Last accessed on 23 August 2013.

4. For maximum protection of the research subjects, all interviews were recorded using alphanumeric codes only during the fieldwork. They remain anonymous in this article, including their titles. The interviews directly referenced in this article are listed in Table A2.

5. Some notable local innovations include city-wide deployment of solar water heaters in Rizhao; city-wide deployment of solar panels in Dezhou; city-wide deployment of renewable energy technologies in Baoding; and green buildings in Shanghai.

6. In 2017, China expanded the policy to 45 new cities, bringing the official total to 87 (Ohshita et al. 2017).

7. The ‘veto power’ designation means that failure to meet such targets would automatically nullify and override all other achievements for a given local official in a given year.

8. Baoding EPB, internal documents.

9. Baoding EPB, internal documents.

10. Calculation based on (Baoding Yearbook 2010).

11. In terms of conceptual definition, there is general agreement that low-carbon city is about ‘maximiz[ing] low-carbon energy sources, enhance[ing] efficiency in delivering urban services, and mov[ing] to lower carbon intensity for a given unit of GDP’ (Baeumler et al. 2012, p. xliii).

12. 2103 out of 24,816 (source: BPWM, internal data).

13. Urban neighborhoods, or neighborhood committees, however, do not have the authority to implement such programs on their own.

Additional information

Funding

Research was generously supported by the U.S. Department of Education, Institute of International Education, Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, U.S. National Security Education Program, U.S. Department of State, Blakemore Foundation, and The MIT-Japan International Studies Fund.