China's evolving green planning system: Are targets the answer?

Arbeitspapier

China's national leaders have recently set ambitious goals to restructure and diversify the economy towards a more resource-efficient and sustainable growth path. To address the growing national environment and energy concerns, leaders introduced several binding environmental targets for government departments and large enterprises. The heavy reliance on a target-based implementation approach raises questions about the effectiveness of this strategy in the short and long run for environmental governance in China. Based on fieldwork in Jiangsu, Hunan, and Shandong provinces in 2012, this paper studies the desirable and undesirable outcomes of binding environmental targets in China's evolving green planning system. This paper argues that environmental targets have a signaling function that has resulted in ecological issues movement onto local governments' core policy agendas. However, in the nascent green planning system, classic planning problems have generated undesirable consequences such that that environmental targets are not always achieving their intended goals. Strategic and cyclical behavior by local government officials in leadership positions often lead to short-term maximization actions instead of long-term innovative environmental management. This analysis of local leaders' responses to top-down targets aims to generate a more realistic picture of what binding environmental targets can and cannot achieve.

Angaben zum Objekt

• Sprache: Englisch

Verweise und Beziehungen

• Erschienen in: Series: Frankfurt School - Working Paper Series ; No. 201

Klassifikation und Themen

• Klassifikation: Wirtschaft ; Energy: Government Policy ; Renewable Resources and Conservation: Government Policy ; Agricultural and Natural Resource Economics; Environmental and Ecological Economics: General ; Socialist Systems and Transitional Economies: Planning, Coordination, and Reform ; Planning Models; Planning Policy ; Regional Development Planning and Policy
• Thema: environmental policy implementation ; regulation ; command and control instruments ; targets ; China ; authoritarian environmentalism

Beteiligte, Orts- und Zeitangaben

• Ereignis: Geistige Schöpfung
• (wer): Kostka, Genia
• Ereignis: Veröffentlichung
• (wer): Frankfurt School of Finance & Management
• (wo): Frankfurt a. M.
• (wann): 2013

Weitere Informationen

• Handle: http://hdl.handle.net/10419/80338
• Letzte Aktualisierung: 10.03.2025, 11:43 MEZ