Global Development Perspective
Working Paper No. 15. 004
April 23, 2015
A Different Explanation on How a Less Developed City Struggled out
of Its CO2 Emission Dilemma: Main Drivers and Determinants
Jiang Wei
Abstract: Facing up to the global warming, China has addressed great efforts on low carbon development. Since the year 2010, it has issued two batches of low carbon pilots. However, not all the pilots produced satisfactory outcomes as expected, while a less developed pilot city, Guangyuan got a reassuring result which was considered as a surprise. How do we explain this surprise? How a less developed city struggled out of its CO2 emission dilemma while pursuing the industrialization and urbanization? Using sequential game and multi-case comparison, this paper tries to examine the main drivers of Guangyuan’s low carbon initiative and the determinants of its achievement. The analysis shows that Guangyuan had no advantages in low carbon potential compared with its reference cities, while the low carbon surprise was due to its strong political willingness and leadership, an effective multi-level governance network and a low carbon oriented evaluation system for local officials. It demonstrates that a less developed city could solve the CO2 emission dilemma while seeking its economic growth; Technical level, fund and human resources are important but not dominant; to ensure the implementation of low carbon policies, meeting low carbon objectives should be taken full consideration into the evaluation system for local officials.
Keywords: Low carbon pilots;Multi-level governance; Sequential city game, China.
1. Introduction
China has addressed great efforts on low carbon development. Since the year 2010, it has issued two batches of low carbon pilots. The first batch of pilots included five provinces as Guangdong, Liaoning, Hubei, Shanxi, Yunnan, two municipalities as Tianjin, Chongqing, and six cities as Shenzhen, Xiamen, Hangzhou, Nanchang, Guiyang, Baoding. The second batch included Hainan province and 28 cities. In order to make possible experiences of the pilots applicable to their similar areas respectively, all the pilots were selected based on the local consent and also to be geographically and economically diverse.
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2. Guangyuan’s CO2 Emission Dilemma and Its Low Carbon Initiative
Guangyuan, a victim city of China’s Wenchuan earthquake in 2008, is located in the northern mountainous area of the Sichuan Basin It covers an area of 16,300 square kilometers and has a population of 2.48 million (2010) . As one of the least developed cities in Sichuan province, Guangyuan is economically far less developed. In 2013, its GDP per capita was about 16.7 thousand yuan . The Wenchuan earthquake once hit a great shock in its development process. Nearly five thousand people died and more than thirty thousand people injured in Guangyuan. It caused a direct economic loss of over 120 billion yuan . The whole infrastructures for electricity, communication, water supply and transportation were severely damaged, which left Guangyuan a tremendous pressure of three joint tasks as reconstruction, industrialization and urbanization.
Considering these tasks and citizens' livelihood, Guangyuan quickly developed its reconstruction plan to address post-earthquake recovery. However, the plan was lack of integration and coordination between economic development and environmental protection. For example, “Guangyuan Urban and Rural Post-earthquake Rebuilding Plan” emphasized the supply of new buildings as fast as possible, while neglecting building energy efficiency and renewable energy utilization (Sichuan DRC, 2008). Originally Guangyuan just intended to take advantage of the rebuilding opportunities and pursue economic development via industrialization, constructing the city as a comprehensive regional transportation hub, a metal smelting base, a coal power generation and hydro power generation base, and a natural gas chemical processing base through developing several polar industries, such as metal smelting, energy and chemical industry and building materials manufactory. In order to expand its industrial development, the local government even established an “express path” for industrial reconstruction projects to get faster administrative approvals via much simpler procedures and less strict requirements (especially waived some of the environmental requirements). As such, energy intensive and highly polluting industries were planted into its territory by taking the opportunities of reconstruction and counterpart assistance .
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3. What Made Guangyuan’s Low Carbon Surprise?
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4. Conclusions and Policy Suggestions
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