Local Environmental Politics in China ─ Challenges and Innovations

Knowledge and insight in national environmental governance in China is widespread. However, increasingly it has been acknowledged that the major problems in guiding the Chinese economy and society towards sustainability are to be found at the local level. This book illuminates the fast-changing dynamics of local environmental politics in China, a topic only marginally addressed in the literature. In the course of building up an institutional framework for environmental governance over the last decade, local actors have generated a variety of policy innovations and experiments. In large measure these are creative responses to two main challenges associated with translating national environmental policies into local realities. The first such challenge is a ‘policy implementation gap’ stemming from the absence of the state capacity necessary to the implementation of environmental measures. The second challenge refers to the need for local non-state actors to engage in environmental management; oftentimes such a ‘participation gap’ contributes to implementation failures. In recent years, we have seen a multitude of initiatives within China at the provincial level and below designed to bridge both ‘gaps’. Hence, the central aim of this book is to assess these experiments and innovations in local environmental politics.

This book was originally published as a special issue of the Journal of Environmental Policy and Planning.

Genia Kostka is an Assistant Professor in Chinese Business Studies at the Frankfurt School of Finance and Management, Germany. Her main research interests are in local environmental politics and policy making in China. She has conducted extensive fieldwork on local government organization and environmental governance in both rural and urban China, focusing on institutional change and policy innovations at the township, county and municipal levels.

Arthur P.J. Mol is chair and Professor in environmental policy at Wageningen University, the Netherlands, Director of the Wageningen School of Social Sciences, and Professor in environmental policy at Renmin University, Beijing. He has worked extensively in China, among others on water management, industrial risk management, nuclear and renewable energy, participative environmental governance, and green growth. He is also joint editor of Environmental Politics.