Governing people, governing places: advancing the Protean environmental state in China

ABSTRACT

Since the 1990s, the unprecedented rate of economic change in China has created a series of critical policy challenges for both central and subnational states. How these policy challenges are conceived will determine how and when they can be solved. There is a growing interest, in particular, in the problematic issues of welfare, resource management and environmental pollution and how those are managed by the local state. In this study, we analyse the ongoing development of the Sino-Singapore Tianjin Eco-City (SSTEC) using the lens of the ‘Protean Environmental State.’ This multi-faceted perspective on development is one that we have further progressed after more than a decade’s research on China’s multi-level environmental governance. In this paper, we concentrate on regulatory and enhancement activities. Our work draws upon fieldwork in and around the SSTEC and highlights the problematic nature of reforms to the environmental state. Ultimately, we explore the inherent and ever-shifting tensions between economic and environmental imperatives in relation to the emerging governance of people and of economic development in present-day China.

KEYWORDS:

• Environmental state
• Tianjin Eco-City
• governance
• China
• sustainability

Acknowledgements

This work was partly supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC) [project number: 71461137005]. Linjun Xie acknowledges the partial support by the International Doctoral Innovation Centre at the University of Nottingham Ningbo China.

Disclosure statement

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

Notes on contributors

Andrew Flynn is a Reader in Environmental Policy in the School of Geography and Planning at Cardiff University. His research centres on the changing nature of the local state and how it is increasingly performing multiple environmental functions; the governance of; and private interests and standard setting.

Linjun Xie is a Postdoctoral Research Associate in the Department of Geography at Durham University. Her research focuses on the governance of urban environment and ecological/sustainable development, notably with an empirical focus on the Chinese eco-city initiatives. She is especially interested in the role of nature-based solutions in contributing to urban sustainability.

Nick Hacking has researched extensively on environmental governance. He is a lecturer in the School of Geography and Planning at Cardiff University.

Notes

1 Apart from the SSTEC other key local institutions are Tianjin-Binhai (which can be considered as akin to local government in the West) and Tianjin government which is a provincial-level government of a mega city.

2 See: https://naturvation.eu/location/asia/cn/tianjin