Coming to Terms with the Authoritarian Alternative: The Implications and Motivations of China's Environmental Policies

Mark Beeson

Asia and the Pacific Policy Studies from Crawford School of Public Policy, The Australian National University

Abstract: China has assumed a crucial importance in debates about climate change mitigation. On the one hand, China is one of the largest emitters of greenhouse gasses and pollution. On the other, it has invested more in renewable energy than any other country and is making real efforts to address the consequences of rapid industrialisation. There are three key questions for students of comparative political economy that emerge from the Chinese experience: first, what is the relationship between economic development and authoritarian rule? Second, what role has China's distinct social and political system played in creating and addressing environmental problems? Third, what domestic and international implications does the ‘China model’ have? In short, will China's authoritarian leaders be able to manage the expectations of its own people and those of the so-called international community? This article considers the often paradoxical and contradictory nature of the authoritarian Chinese government's current environmental policies and suggests that while they may have some success at the domestic level, they may still be an obstacle to international cooperation.

Keywords: China; environmental policy; authoritarianism; policy implementation (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 13 pages
Date: 2017-12-27
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cdm, nep-cna, nep-ene, nep-env, nep-hme and nep-tra
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Published in Asia & the Pacific Policy Studies, Jan 2018, pages 34-46

Downloads: (external link)
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/wol1/doi/10.1002/app5.217/full (application/pdf)
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 403 Forbidden (http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/wol1/doi/10.1002/app5.217/full [301 Moved Permanently]--> https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/wol1/doi/10.1002/app5.217/full)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:een:appswp:201803

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Asia and the Pacific Policy Studies from Crawford School of Public Policy, The Australian National University Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sung Lee ( this e-mail address is bad, please contact ).