Deal With The Challenges Of Climate Change Governance Problems In China

This thesis tries to establish an analytical framework of the emergence of local climate governance in China, under which the local policy-making about climate challenges are simulated and studied. It raised several fundamental research questions:1) at local level of China, what factors would influence the local strategies on whether and how to act on climate challenges?2) In current multi-agent and multi-level patterns of climate governance, what are patterns of local policy-making based on a) the balance of supervisor’s requirement and down-to-earth local needs, b) the balance of short-term vision vs. long-term vision,and c) uncertainty?3) What are the pros and cons of such local policy-making, and how to make improvement, in order to optimize the policy instruments for central/regional regulation, and to encourage adaptive management? The preceding discussion makes clear the importance of local governance on climate challenges. The literatures of China’s environmental governance and worldwide existing practices on local climate mitigation are reviewed. A section on the application of various economic models toward climate issues is also included.I present China’s planned environmentalism during the11th Five-Year Plan (FYP) period which was successful at reducing sulfur dioxide (SO2) and chemical oxygen demand (COD) due to the target responsibility system (TRS) on pollution reduction goals.1attach great importance on a redefined responsibility of environmental protection from local Environmental Protection Bureaus (EPBs) to local government leaders. However, the weakness of current mono-centric planning process is obvious in the context of governing complex socio-ecological changes. In this chapter, two alternative approaches, decentralization of the nation’s planning regime and participatory governance with public involvement, were proposed to improve China’s environmental governance system.1provided a comparative study of local climate mitigation from both China and Japan, in the context of pessimistic international regimes, to achieve significant results on climate mitigation. I compared the political systems, institutional arrangements and local actors in local climate mitigation through a policy cycle analysis. I found that climate initiatives in the two countries have inherited the political characteristics of traditional environmental management within a centralized administrative system; moreover, these initiatives also reflect the emergence of local governance. Due to similar political cultures but differing roles for local governments, both countries are making progress with respect to the agenda setting and policy formation stages, and are facing greater obstacles regarding implementation and evaluation. The mono-centric local governance in China results in an easy but irrational planning process, while the powerless local agents in Japan can hardly promote bolder campaigns on energy industries. Current administrative systems created by decades of local environmental problem-solving are no longer adaptive enough to facilitate the bottom-up emergence of local mitigating activities. Local governments and administration systems should be adaptive regarding capacity building and institutional innovation to improve local governance on climate mitigation.I presented a case study to explain the detailed local efforts in China’s ecological industrial parks (EIPs) to assess GHG emissions and identify potential mitigation measures. Through field study and interviews in Suzhou Industrial Park (SIP), in Jiangsu Province, we conducted an energy-based GHG emissions inventory for SIP area from2005-2010, with forecasts to2015. The area emitted a total of10.30MT CO2E in2010. Three development strategies including business-as-usual (BAU), existing and pending regulations (EPR) and voluntary mitigating efforts (VME) were introduced to estimate the energy-related GHG emissions in2015. The results projected that emissions will increase to17.16Mt in2015with no change in policy or practice, but3.42Mt of emissions are avoidable with full compliance with national and provincial energy policies (1.41Mt), as well as local efforts (2.01Mt). This study furthers the understanding of the potential effectiveness of carbon reduction strategies of industrial parks in China, including the development industrial symbiosis (IS) and on-site renewable energy projects.I introduced the research of new public management (NPM) as well as principal-agent (PA) problem to further explore the local policy-making mechanism. With game theory, I elaborated the utility function of local policy-makers, which included both the utilities of public goods provision, and their political benefit estimated by themselves. I illustrated thirteen categories of local strategies that could help to address climate mitigation or adaptation issues, each with several features, represented as time scale, investment, income, effectiveness and central regulation. Each local policy-maker has a strategy profile that would provide utility. It then turns into a dynamic game with imperfect and incomplete information, in which each local policy-maker tries to observe the conditional probability for certain strategy profile to win worthwhile utilities, take actions, and observe again.I provided detailed discussion and explanation of the theoretical game model. I firstly compare the research regime with US’s local climate policy-making studies, which contains a public goods provision assumption. It is noticeable that due to different principal-agent structure, it is plausible for US central government to make stringent national regulation even if it receives new information suggesting that such regulation is more costly than previously thought. I move on to explain the emergence of climate or low-carbon campaigns at local level of China, and comment such phenomenon as "Greenwash" of "entrepreneurial government". Due to the existence of the information of action set, it is common for local policy-makers to attach greater importance on economic development while "greenwashing" the signals of their strategies to win better reputation, so that their utilities would be maximized. On the other hand, the emergency of pilot programs supported by central government could somehow fix such twisted signals, and even approach complete information in the policy-making game.Finally, in Chapter VIII, the main results and contributions of the dissertation were summarized, that China’s local slogans on environmental and climate governance keep changing, and local policy-makers are actually participating social experiments that are only partially designed by the central government. The externality of environmental and climate issues could be successfully changed into political considerations, which are the major trade-off in the patterns of developing local economy. There are currently no incentives for local policy-maker to directly include public awareness and involvement in the decision-making of environmental and climate issues, unless it could lead to negative political influence that is harmful to social stability. Such progressive innovation is crucial to China’s sustainable development, although the process itself is time-consuming.