Local environmental governance

This chapter provides an overview of the evolution of China’s local environmental governance during the last two decades. To this end, it analyses both structural aspects and political processes. Structural aspects encompass organisational features of the environmental governance apparatus, and the mechanisms by which it regulates, plans, and manages interactions between human activities and natural environments. Since most of these functions are entrusted to State authorities, the chapter mainly focuses on organisations within the Chinese bureaucracy. As for political processes – the second dimension informing this chapter – they can be understood as the interactions between the visions, interests, and agency of different actors, which shape environmental governance goals, functions, and outcomes. The structure of this chapter is as follows: the first section introduces the potential and challenges of local environmental governance as highlighted in international research and practice. The term ‘local’ is employed here to indicate environmental governance structures at the subnational level (from the provincial level below), and to describe localised environmental interventions, planned and implemented in delimited geographical areas. Subsequent sections then concentrate on the Chinese case, by introducing the breakthroughs and shortcomings of China’s environmental governance at the local level. The chapter then moves on to discuss current trends in China’s local environmental governance against the wider background of emergent paradigms of sustainability science and practice, highlighting promising spaces for innovation (Chaffin et al. 2016). Finally, it shares pathways of thinking and action that may rejuvenate the research agenda on local environmental governance in China, complementing recent academic debates (Shin 2017).