The Nexus between Authoritarian and Environmental Regionalism: An Analysis of China’s Driving Role in the Shanghai Cooperation Organization

ABSTRACT

This article explores the growing environmental activism of nondemocratic regional organizations (NDROs) by investigating the case of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), addressing the following questions: What explains the emergence of environmental regionalism in the SCO? What are its characteristics and effects? We show that China has acted as the driver of environmental regionalism in the SCO —whose members rank among the world’s top CO₂ emitters— providing positive incentives for the establishment of regional environmental institutions and fostering member states’ green energy transition through the top-down deployment of Chinese financial institutions and construction companies. In so doing, China has sought to consolidate its regional leadership in Eurasia, while promoting its economic statecraft and its bid for global environmental leadership.

Acknowledgments

We thank Diego Telias for his excellent research assistantship and the anonymous reviewers of PPC for their very valuable comments and suggestions.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Supplemental data

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed on the publisher’s website at https://doi.org/10.1080/10758216.2021.1974887

Notes

1. We define “environmental regionalism” as a predominantly state-led project based on intergovernmental negotiations aimed at promoting regional cooperation and institution building in the environmental sector.

2. As noted by Elliott and Breslin (2011), the founding documents of ROs across different regions hardly mention the issue of environmental protection.

3. Europe was the first region to formalize (by treaty) regional environmental action through the 1986 Single European Act, which was followed by a variety of other – increasingly demanding – requirements to integrate environmental concerns in all the issue areas of the European integration process (Vogler 2011).

4. Member states of NDROs are not necessarily consolidated autocracies but also hybrid regimes (see Libman and Obydenkova 2018; Obydenkova and Libman 2019).

5. A preliminary regional cooperative framework – the “Shanghai Five” – had already been established in 1996 by China, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Russia, and Tajikistan.

6. China promoted the creation of the SCO permanent secretariat, financing the construction of its headquarters (located in Beijing) and providing the bulk of its staff (Chung 2006).

7. As a reference, the EU-27 averages 0.7.

8. Since 2006, China has been the global leader in annual carbon emissions, surpassing the US (Jones 2007).

9. In 2013, the government announced a huge USD 277 billion investment to curb air pollution in Beijing (Quigley 2013).

10. In 2019, 13% of energy consumed in China came from renewable sources, compared to 11% in the US and 18% in the EU. China has committed to increase that proportion to 20% by 2030, but to do so it needs to move away from coal, which in 2019 still made up 58% of its energy mix (China Power Team 2021).

11. Nearly one third of every solar panel and wind turbine in the world are located in China. China is also home to half of the world’s electric cars and 98% of its electric buses (Hove and Sandalow 2019).

12. Interestingly, all the books and reports published by the EISP, as well as the newsletter that publicize the progress of the SCO’s environmental protection efforts, are managed by the CSEC on behalf of the EISP.

13. Europe comes second, with 267GW added (21.3%), and the US third with 151GW (12%).

14. This is not a minor point considering that a recent study estimated that the world’s highest mortality rates associated with PM2.5 from fossil fuel combustion are in China, India, and the geographical area between Pakistan and southern Kazakhstan (Vohra et al. 2021).

15. The CGGC – whose main shareholder is the state-owned China Energy Engineering Corporation – has been the constructor of several projects in the SCO countries, such as a 254 MW hydropower station on the Chilik river in Kazakhstan (Global Times 2010) and a 40 km section of the Hazara motorway in Pakistan (CGTN 2017).

16. The collapse of the USSR, and the subsequent breakdown of the regional energy-sharing arrangements that had been in place since Soviet times, forced Tajikistan to reorganize its electricity system to become independent of the former Soviet energy system. However, in the midst of such readjustment, the civil war broke out. Virtually no money was spent on the maintenance of the domestic energy infrastructure during the civil war years, which resulted in a deterioration of the turbines and electrical systems of the country’s hydropower plants (Olcott 2012).

17. In November 2020, Prime Minister Narendra Modi declared that India has the fourth largest renewable power capacity in the world and that he wants to turn India into a global manufacturing hub in the renewable energy sector (Koundal 2021). Some of India’s largest renewable energy companies (e.g. Adani Green Energy Limited, Tata Power, Torrent Power, Suzlon Energy, ReNew Power, Muppandal Wind, and Welspun Energy) could potentially compete with their Chinese counterparts in developing energy projects in the SCO countries.

Additional information

Funding

The authors acknowledge the financial support of Chile’s Agencia Nacional de Investigación y Desarrollo (ANID) through Fondecyt Iniciación: Grants #11200118 and #11180081.