Geoffrey Chun-fung Chen

Growing China’s renewables sector: a developmental state approach

ABSTRACT Over the last decade China expanded its renewable energy sector with unprecedented speed. This success story presents a challenge to Western modes of environmental governance, where stakeholder participation is often deemed a necessary pre-condition for effective policy outcomes. Drawing on new research (including previously unpublished interview data), the article first discusses established modes of environmental governance before examining the growth of China’s renewables sector through the theoretical lens of the ‘developmental state’. The article then analyses renewable energy policy design and implementation in China, illustrating how top-down command and control strategies have successfully diffused renewable energy technology from a standing start. We argue that (1) China’s distinct approach to the sector differs from Western modes of environmental governance and (2) this has revealed a new path towards renewable energy diffusion that authoritarian states in particular might regard as an attractive alternative to participatory models.

State-owned enterprises and the political economy of state–state relations in the developing world

Abstract The literature on developmental states has built theories of growth-enhancing strategies through a mutually constitutive state–business relationship and institutionalised expertise through a professional bureaucracy. Whilst most evidence bears on the East Asian context, recent empirical work has focussed on state agency and new industrial policies in response to global market integration. Our paper contributes to this debate by exploring multiple patterns of state enterprise reforms that have enabled governments to generate competitive domestic firms. These reforms, then, lead to new theoretical insights as regards the diverse institutional arrangements co-constituting state–state relationships across countries and sectors. Overall, the paper views state-owned enterprises (SOEs) as complex organisations that bear new developmental capacities rather than vessels of rent-seeking interests.

Theoretical Approaches to the System of Governance of Renewable Energy in China

We have discussed the puzzle of how and under what conditions good governance can be generated in our review of the literature pertinent to sustainable energy. It seems that one of the notable controversies underlying the account of orthodox governance is about the effectiveness of decentralisation, the main question being whether decentralisation is conducive to achieving substantial changes of policy and governance (e.g. Bardhan and Mookherjee 2007). This discussion has not only become prevalent in the literature of governance theory but has also increasingly become the central point of dispute in the literature of environmental politics. The rise of the theory and practice of decentralisation is increasingly used in the ‘back-story’, as it were, of globalisation, in which scepticism about the role of the state has prevailed (Bevir 2009). Considered as the means and process of displacement of state power (Pierre and Peters 2000, p. 89), decentralisation is not only a new solution to economic and administrative public demand but is also regarded as a normative institutional design that is plausible for the modern state (Stoker 1998; Rhodes 2007).

Towards a New Model of Sustainable Energy Development

This book contributes to the debate around environmental politics and policy by showing that, although decentralised politics has become, by consensus, the model for environmental governance (Hajer and Kesselring 1999; Bluhdorn 2013), China’s renewable energy governance model represents an accidental competing model that challenges the orthodox model of environmental governance. This pattern was formed by large-scale centralised state intervention mechanisms which did not involve adopting the Western orthodoxy of participatory governance. China’s policy leaders may have simply seen it as an exclusive strategy motivated by self-preservation. However, this practice has unexpectedly extended beyond the default assumption of the inclusive mode of governance, allowing it—to some extent—to bypass the prolonged dilemma in environmental doctrine between efficiency and democracy, swiftly reaching desired objectives of renewable energy-related environmental policy.

How States Build Sustainable Energy Capacity

Mitigating the effects of man-made global warming entails reshaping the sectorial structure, changing consumer culture, accelerating technological innovation, and raising public environmental awareness; and, most importantly, the task requires substantial political support for policy leaders so that they may secure immediate, feasible mitigation resolutions to implement long-term climate strategies. Such political support has been considered as needing to be formulated on the basis of a democratic decision-making process in which widening public participation is assumed non-negotiable if legitimately secure agreements are to be reached among various stakeholders to tackle environmentally sensitive problems (OECD 2002; Bulkeley and Mol 2003; Stevenson and Dryzek 2014). As part of climate mitigation strategies, the development of sustainable energy has occurred under a universal cognition that is profoundly dependent on democratic political support. The strategy that has been implemented thus far in many industrial countries has been established through a mode of governance that explicitly requires the strengthening of local public participation; otherwise, it is deemed impossible to contribute accountably to improving environmental policy outcomes (Van Tatenhove and Leroy 2003; Few et al. 2007; Andrews-Speed 2012; Devine-Wright 2012). This assumption is also embedded in an emerging consensus regarding an environmental policy template—sustainable development—that entails central government giving up power to local-level governments and creating a new partnership with non-governmental actors in the formation of environmental policies (WCED 1987; Baker 2005). This has become a dominant policy template adopted by an increasing number of states (Hajer 1997).

The Chinese State, the Perceived Environmental Crisis, and the Mixed Paradigm for Diffusing Non-Hydro Renewable Energy

In terms of its current state of economic development, China appears to be a robust entity that will continue to grow in the future. Looking back over its short history of economic reform, the country has made swift progress in economic growth in only three decades, moving from an underdeveloped state to becoming the world’s second-largest economy. Its gross domestic product (GDP) has risen at an unprecedented rate, to the extent that many commentators have described the phenomenon (either with positive or negative connotations) as a Miracle, the China Model, or Resilient Authoritarianism, in response to its seemingly unique mode of development (e.g. Gilley 2003; Lin et al. 2003; Zhao 2010; Nathan 2003, 2013; Teets 2013, 2014). The increasing presence of this vocabulary in the literature reflects the fact that initially there was a misunderstanding in predictions about the regime in China, in which an unexpected economic and political phenomenon was encountered. These predictions were rooted in an implicit assumption that the governing system would eventually end, be replaced, or be normalised in the wake of democratisation and capitalist globalisation. However, at least until today, certain eschatological expectations for this regime have not yet been realised, and as many have reluctantly found, the regime of the Chinese Communist Party has not failed thus far but has been bolstered by its deliberate manipulation of state capacity, influencing the world through its neighbouring countries as well as the global community, although internally there is a vulnerability in relation to the stability of the regime (Mertha 2010; Li 2012).

Orthodoxies of Energy Governance

For two decades, in the production and accumulation of a growing social science literature, we seem to have witnessed a fundamental change in the ways of seeing government and decision-making under the burgeoning discussion of governance. In order to meet new policy challenges, new fragmented patterns of state-society relations, multi-information gathering, or even higher citizens’ expectations for better public services, public agencies have been given broader responsibilities when making decisions (Pierre and Peters 2000; Bevir et al. 2003a, b; Kooiman 2003; Rhodes 2007; Bevir 2009). They are no longer just asked to follow instructions passed down through traditional vertical levels. Instead, they are expected to undertake a more important external role in order to seek more effective policy outcomes, and so-called stakeholder engagement is regarded as key to promoting various types of public sector performance in a number of industrialised states (Rhodes 1997; Kjaer 2004; Bevir 2010). In the fields of energy, environment, and even in public affairs, it seems to be the case that conceptual changes in perceiving government’s role in providing public services proliferate, while, in the meantime, the concept of governance has become more and more dominant in the contemporary world. However, heterogeneous and ambiguous definitions, and the struggle over practice in the real world, are causing numerous academic debates. In this chapter, I will start conducting an investigation into the connotations of governance, from the broad concept to a discussion of the relations of governance in eco-politics for energy, so as to explore theoretical and practical controversies. The structure of the chapter is as follows. First, I will discuss the definition of governance. Then I will move into the literature of eco-politics, examining notions of sustainability with the changing relationship between participation and inclusiveness introduced before and after the Brundtland Report. I will also discuss the challenges that governance orthodoxy has encountered in real world settings.