Making Authoritarian Environmentalism Accountable? Understanding China’s New Reforms on Environmental Governance

• Published date: 01 March 2021
• Author: Wei Shen,Dong Jiang
• Date: 01 March 2021
• DOI: 10.1177/1070496520961136
• Subject Matter: Articles

Article

Making Authoritarian

Environmentalism

Accountable?

Understanding China’s

New Reforms on

Environmental

Governance

Wei Shen

1

and Dong Jiang

2

Abstract

One of the key puzzles of authoritarian environmentalism is its dubious effectiveness

due to fragmented interests among different political and market actors, which are

often found undermining centrally crafted environmental regulations and targets.

China recently launched a series of institutional reforms to fix its notorious local

implementation gaps on environmental policies. By setting up a stringent central

inspection system and holding frequent inquiry meetings with local government

leaders, Beijing aims to reconfigure central–local power relations on environmental

governance. We argue that these institutional reforms are essentially transforming

environmental governance in China into a highly politicized task by enforcing party

disciplines rather than legal frameworks. The aim is to rein environmental officers

and hold local political leaders accountable. These reforms may significantly reduce

local protectionism, yet such highly politicized approach based on coercive party

rules and disciplines bears the risk of weakening the role of legal enforcement and

can breed discontent among local officers. Consequently, how these new reforms

can achieve a desirable central–local relation for addressing China’s environmental

crisis in the long run is far from certain.

1

Resource Politics Cluster, Institute of Development Studies, Brighton, United Kingdom

2

School of Law, Renmin University of China, Beijing, China

Corresponding Author:

Dong Jiang, School of Law, Renmin University of China, Beijing 100872, China.

Email: djiang@ruc.edu.cn

Journal of Environment &

Development: A Review of International

Policy

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DOI: 10.1177/1070496520961136

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2021, Vol. 30(1) 41 –67

42 Journal of Environment & Development: A Review of International Policy 30(1)

Keywords

environmental authoritarianism, China, accountability, institutional reforms

After decades of unprecedented economic growth and industrialization, China

has not only become the second-largest economy in the world but also created a

full-scale environmental crisis within its territory. The air, water, and soil pol-

lution have all reached critical levels, and various forms of natural resources

have been either overused or irreversibly damaged (State Council, 2016).

The severe environmental problems threaten its environmental sustainability

and social stability, as there is a rising dissatisfaction among Chinese people

to the deteriorating environment quality and related harms to their health

(Steinhardt & Wu, 2016; Xie, 2012), and mass protests on environmental

crisis are surging in the past two decades (Van Rooij, 2010). Consequently,

Chinese central government in the past decade has exhibited an increasing deter-

mination and ambition to tackle various environmental problems in the coun-

try, announcing stringent measures, targets, and regulations. Yet, implementing

of these regulations at local level was known by both scholars and practitioners

as highly challenging in Chinese governance context (Eaton & Kostka, 2014;

Economy, 2010; Mertha, 2009).

Beijing obviously acknowledged this problem and initiated a new round of

institutional reforms since Xi Jinping came into power in 2012. Beijing has even

altered the highest political discourse by redef‌ining the so-called primary social

conf‌lict (Zhuyao Maodun,主要矛盾) in China as “the gap between people’s

growing demand for a better life and unbalanced or insuff‌icient development”

(People’s Daily, 2017). This is a crucial revision of the previous political doctrine

since the beginning of marketization reforms in the early 1980s, which empha-

sized “the gaps between people’s growing material and cultural demands

and backward productivity” (Chinese Communist Party [CCP], 1981) as the

biggest challenge for China. Such change is widely believed as a paradigm

shift from a developmentalist approach focusing merely on economic growth

to a more comprehensive strategy with environmental and ecological sustain-

ability as one of the key priorities for the CCP (The New York Times, 2018;

Xinhua News, 2018).

Besides changing political discourse, to tackle the specif‌ic problem of ineff‌i-

cient local implementation of environmental regulations, a series of policy and

institutional experiments were introduced. The establishment of a new Ministry

of Ecology and Environment (MEE) in 2018 can be viewed as the apex

of this round of reforms, which attracts growing academic attention

(Kostka & Zhang, 2018) to timely open up the discussion regarding the

2Journal of Environment & Development: A Review of International Policy 0(0)