Carbon fee and climate governance delayism in Taiwan

Kuei-Tien Chou, David Walther, Mu-Xing Lin and Hwa-Meei Liou ()
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Kuei-Tien Chou: National Taiwan University
David Walther: National Taiwan University
Mu-Xing Lin: National Taiwan University
Hwa-Meei Liou: National Taiwan University of Science and Technology

Review of Evolutionary Political Economy, 2025, vol. 6, issue 1, 1-42

Abstract: Abstract After three unsuccessful attempts to implement an energy tax, Taiwan introduced a carbon fee system through an amendment to the Greenhouse Gas Reduction and Management Act at the end of 2020, opening a fourth window of opportunity for carbon pricing. However, this limited carbon fee illustrates that Taiwan has taken only a tiny step forward in climate governance and highlights its lock-in, high-carbon economic path. This seems infeasible without the exogenous pressure of the European Union’s Carbon Boundary Adjustment Mechanism. Compared with East Asia’s carbon-intensive industries in Korea, China, and Japan, Taiwan lags significantly in promoting carbon pricing. This study focuses on Taiwan’s carbon fee decision-making mechanisms, democratic processes, and structural constraints within a high-carbon economy as viewed through developmental environmentalism in the East Asian climate governance literature. This study further explores how the predicament of green transformation in high-carbon-emitting developing countries takes shape, including their climate policies, value, and industrial path dependence, and especially their authoritarian and recentralized bureaucratic decision-making mode, to explain the delay in the transformation. By examining Taiwan’s initial carbon fee decision-making, this study attempts to reinterpret developmental environmentalism, shedding light on the structural predicament arising from the internationally compulsory green transformation faced by all high-carbon-emitting manufacturing countries in Asia and globally.

Keywords: Carbon fee; Environmental governance; Governance delayism; Developmental environmentalism; Climate change (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025
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DOI: 10.1007/s43253-024-00118-0

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