Essays on China's environmental governance in transition

Abstract

The trend of rising re-centralization under the Xi era calls for a reassessment of China’s environmental governance. The deployment of a range of new environmental policy tools starts to shift power relations among a host of actors, bringing new discourse to China’s environmental governance that goes beyond ‘authoritarian environmentalism.’ This three-essay dissertation focuses on this trend of re-centralization and develops based on the concept of ‘state-led environmentalism.’ It does so by taking a state-centric approach and using three policy tools as a vehicle to examine the role of the state in recent environmental governance practices in China.

This dissertation first uses the Central Environmental Inspection Teams (CEITs) as a vehicle to understand the dynamics and effectiveness of command-and-control tools in China’s state-led environmentalist regime. Through a combination of primary and secondary data, the second chapter partially reconstructs the inaugural CEIT deployment in Hebei province in 2016 from the perspectives of government officials, private and state-owned companies, and local residents. While it finds that the CEIT has generally proven effective in identifying and rectifying violations of environmental regulations, as an institutional solution, it is inefficient and highly-resource intensive. Furthermore, it is likely to generate unintended governance outcomes in the medium-to-longer run, and has significant social justice implications.

Then this dissertation makes a turn towards the examination of a relatively new policy tool – the Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS). It uses the Guangdong carbon market as an illustrative study to understand the effectiveness and incentives of incentive-based instruments in China’s state-led environmentalist regime. Through a combination of a robust quasi-experimental methodological approach with natural language processing techniques, the third chapter shows that while the Guangdong ETS reduced emissions in the short run, these reductions were systematically associated with political signaling. This suggests that current incentive-based approaches in China may not be qualitatively different from more direct forms of environmental regulation.

The next chapter moves beyond the domestic arena and explores how China’s international climate leadership aspirations have an impact on domestic support for a carbon tax policy. Through a combination of vignette experiments with a conjoint experiment, the finding shows that, against the backdrop of ever-tightening state control, public support towards the state-led climate policy continues to be stubbornly low. Beyond the projection of discursive and soft-power propaganda, rhetorical devices from the state may not have a significant and direct impact on public perception and support on the ground regarding costly climate policies.

Through a thorough examination of three cases, this dissertation finds that while there is increasing use of market-based instruments and participatory channels, the ‘shadow of the state’ continues to occupy a primary role in addressing environmental issues in China. This results in considerable inefficiencies affecting the implementation of environmental regulations and market-based instruments, giving rise to significant social justice implications and presenting a disconnected discourse between China’s international leadership aspirations and public support for climate policy.