of natural resources have also undermined the country’s self-proclaimed leadership in planetary ecological civilization. In this book, we seek to untangle these seemingly contradictory observations about China’s green politics and ecological conditions.
What is State-led Environmentalism?
Almost every course on environmental politics includes discussion of the “Tragedy of the Commons,” the classic 1968 Science magazine essay in which Garrett Hardin articulates a core metaphor describing how human beings deplete shared resources (Hardin 1968). We professors often organize students around tables with goldfish crackers and straws and instruct them to go fishing – before long, there are no fish left in the “sea.” Hardin argued that rational individuals will necessarily and inevitably over-extract resources from shared spaces because their self-interests, collectively, outweigh the good of the group. In the essay, he describes townspeople who added so many sheep to an English common pasture that the fields could not sustain them. But the metaphor can be extended to other common “goods” – fisheries, forests, and water – as well as common “bads” – factory smokestack emissions, discharges into shared watercourses, “space junk,” and noise pollution. Hardin’s position is that “mutually agreed-upon coercion” is the only way to avoid the inevitable overexploitation of the shared resource; he lauds “the greater candor of the word coercion” and problematizes the ideal of individual freedom.
During the 1970s the essay was much discussed, and refuted, by scholars who objected to the authoritarian tenor of Hardin’s approach. They showed that “open access” resources like the fisheries of the high seas were very different from “common pool” resources like coastal fisheries where communities could agree through consultation to be bound by measures to assure sustainable use such as catch size, technology restrictions, permit issuance, and seasonal limits. Elinor Ostrom is best known for writing on this but many others have used combinations of economic game theory and sociological research to show that communities who know each other and expect to work together for the foreseeable future are more likely to create workable community-based resource management systems (Ostrom 1990; Petrzelka and Bell 2000). For transnational and planet-level environmental issues, the challenge is to create a “global community” that can cooperate to manage shared resources without succumbing to self-interest.
International environmental treaties provide a form of coercion established collaboratively through the consent of the governed, and at times they have offered great promise. In 1992, with the Rio Earth Summit (United Nations Conference on Environment and Development), it appeared that such global cooperation might work. There were high hopes that countries would overcome the barriers of sovereignty to manage transboundary environmental problems like climate change, biodiversity loss, desertification, and so on. Along with 169 other countries, China signed the Rio Declaration and ratified many of the treaties that emerged from that historic meeting. By then, socialism was on the wane with the dissolution of the Soviet Union, and the debate over the need for coercive measures to resolve environmental problems had abated. Many Western scholars took it as a given that public participation, rule of law, and guarantees of access to information were necessary for robust environmental governance (Schnaiberg 1980; Young 1994). Unfortunately, since then environmental governance has struggled to find broad consensus and legitimacy at local, regional, international, and global levels.
In recent decades, it has become increasingly clear that the promise of the Rio Earth Summit has not been realized apart from isolated successes with phasing out a short list of ozone-depleting chemicals like CFCs and controlling obvious neurotoxins like mercury. The democratic elections of Donald Trump in the US and Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil, both of whom actively undermined principles and protections for the natural world, have further challenged assumptions about liberal market systems’ environmental virtues. Can the planet afford a messy liberal democratic process when the threats are so urgent?
In this context, then, eco-authoritarianism seems to some observers and scholars to offer a possible solution when other measures have failed. Among those who have revived the conversation is Mark Beeson, who writes, in “The Coming of Environmental Authoritarianism,” that “good” authoritarianism, where unsustainable behaviors are outright banned, by fiat, is essential for the long-term survival of humanity (Beeson 2010). Predictably, the essay sparked refutations. For example, Dan Coby Shahar writes that even though liberal market democracy does not seem to offer much hope for the environment, eco-authoritarianism is “not an attractive alternative” because the ruling class may not be capable of producing or implementing pro-environmental policies over the long run (Shahar 2015). During the revived debate, many environmentalists continue to argue instead for cooperative global governance of environmental problems through better multilateral treaties and institutions, on the grounds of shared interests and the findings of scientists. Others seek to reform global trade by internalizing the environmental costs of production and making them more transparent, and by changing the mindsets of consumers. Still others see hope in empowering local communities and restricting the extractive power of international corporations (Clapp and Dauvergne 2011).
Scholars of coercive state-led environmentalism have turned their focus to China to flesh out the implications of managing the environment through authoritarian means. The empirical literature has generated valuable insights into three main dimensions of Chinese environmental governance. First, research has uncovered a range of governmental tools that characterize the state’s efforts to manage the environment. Often, technocratic elites take a dominant position in defining environmental problems in purely technical terms (Gilley 2012; Kostka and Zhang 2018). With these mechanistic approaches, officials set quantitative goals and targets for the ostensible purposes of monitoring environmental conditions and enforcing environmental standards (Kostka 2016; Yifei Li 2019). However, these targets give rise to “blunt force regulations” that over-enforce environmental mandates to the detriment of the livelihoods of ordinary citizens (van der Kamp 2017). Moreover, state-led environmental programs tend to orient toward outcomes but forgo transparency and justice (Johnson 2001; Chen and Lees 2018). On a positive note, in some cases the outcome orientation gives the local state a high level of flexibility and adaptability in enforcing environmental regulations (Ahlers and Shen 2017; Zhu and Chertow 2019). This first aspect of state-led environmentalism features a constellation of routine governmental tools used by state officials and bureaucrats in their exercise of environmental power. Some of these tools prove effective in advancing environmental goals, but others have mixed environmental, as well as political, consequences.
Second, the extensive use of state-centric governmental tools gives rise to changes in state–society relations. As the state increasingly intervenes into the environmental realm, it becomes commonplace for the state to regulate everyday citizen behaviors through coercive means (Eaton and Kostka 2014). From recycling to driving vehicles, environmental regulations are often instituted without meaningful public participation or grassroots input, giving the state sweeping power in its pursuit of environmental ends, with only limited access to feedback that might correct any missteps (Mao and Zhang 2018). With no threat that power holders will be removed from office via ballot or other electoral device, the state is unaccountable for its coercive dictates. Yet, the state has to come to terms with an increasingly diverse range of non-state environmental actors, from citizens to independent scientists, which the state needs but also fears (van Rooij et al. 2016; Guttman et al. 2018). Within its ambivalent relationship with society, the Chinese state casts a changeable shadow over the full range of environmental affairs. It narrows the space for non-state engagement in some cases (Wilson 2016), but also inadvertently creates opportunities in others (Geall 2018). In recent years, for example, domestic civil society organizations have seen some measure of success in their pursuit of environmental accountability, but international organizations are subject to increasing scrutiny and pressure (Tilt 2019). Taken together, China’s state–society relations are in flux. In this constantly shifting landscape of power, growing non-state interests in environmental affairs are met with escalating state efforts to contain and co-opt the space for public participation.
Third, the rise of China’s state-led environmentalism reflects a broad trend toward power centralization
