Chapter 9 Environmental State in Transformation: The Emergence of Low-Carbon Development in Urban China

Purpose – The net increase in China's urban population in the last 50 years equals the current total population of the European Union. The scale and speed of urbanization in China requires a sustainable solution to unprecedented energy demands and elevated carbon emissions. As low-carbon development emerges in urban China, it offers a unique vantage point to examine some fundamental theoretical questions of the environmental state. How do structural socioeconomic changes affect the environmental state? Does the rise of the environmental state offer a basis for regulatory reform on a broader scale?

Methodology/approach – Case study of five low-carbon cities in China provides the empirical evidence for the analysis. The five cities represent a continuum in their levels of postindustrialization. I compare low-carbon development strategies in postindustrial cities with those strategies in industrial cities. Evidence is collected primarily by way of interviews with planning bureau officials, urban design professionals, involved NGOs, academics, and private sector individuals familiar with the matter.

Findings – First, in cities where the level of postindustrialization is high, state resources support innovative low-carbon development strategies that attempt to achieve emission reductions in a variety of sectors. In industrial cities, however, the environmental state's regulative power is limited to one or two (sub)sectors. Second, and more importantly, a new pattern of governance is emerging in postindustrial cities. Low-carbon development in postindustrial cities is a much less centralized process, having local levels of governments as key players of low-carbon policy making. When the environmental state intersects with the postindustrial city, it gives birth to a new urbanism that has profound implications for political structuring in China.

Research limitations – The analysis in this chapter is based on evidence from a purposefully selected set of Chinese cities, which may render the results biased. Future studies should aim for a more systematic analysis of cities in order to establish more generalizable conclusions. In addition, given the increasing availability of quantitative data at the city level in China, future studies should also seek to incorporate quantitative analyses to better substantiate existing knowledge derived from qualitative sources of evidence.

Originality/value of chapter – First, this chapter challenges the Western bias in the existing literature on the environmental state. The role of the civil society is far from salient in the Chinese context, and yet the environmental state demonstrates a robust level of activity despite the weak civil society. It therefore seems that a general theory of the environmental state can be built from existing literature, but needs to be sensitive to non-Western social conditions that might falsify parts of the theoretical claims. Second, the environmental state literature can be consolidated and further developed when examined in conjunction with other literatures in the modernity tradition. I have demonstrated the connection between the environmental state and the postindustrial city. More studies are needed to examine other facets of the environmental state, as it intersects with a multitude of (post)modern conditions.