Greening China’s Urban Governance Tackling Environmental and Sustainability Challenges

This volume examines how urban stakeholders in China – particularly city governments and social actors – tackle China’s urban environmental crisis. The volume’s case studies speak to important interdisciplinary themes such as new tools and instruments of urban green governance, climate change and urban carbon consumption, green justice, digital governance, public participation, social media, social movements, and popular protest. It lays out a unique theoretical framework for examining and discussing urban green governance.

The case studies are based on extensive fieldwork that examines governance failures, challenges, and innovations from across China, including the largest cities. They show that numerous policies, experiments, and reforms have been put in place in China – mostly on a pragmatic basis, but also as a result of both strategic policy design, civil participation, and protest. The book highlights how China’s urban governments bring together diverse programmatic building blocks and instruments, from China and elsewhere.

Written by experts and researchers from different disciplines at leading universities in China and the Nordic countries in Europe, this volume will be of interest to researchers and students who are interested in Chinese politics, especially urban politics, governance issues, and social movements. Both students and teachers will find the theoretical perspectives and case studies useful in their coursework.The unique green governance perspective makes this a work that is empirically and theoretically interesting for those working with urban political and environmental studies and urbanization worldwide.

Dr. Jorgen Delman is a Professor of China Studies at the University of Copenhagen. His research examines state-society relations and political change in contemporary China. His current focus is on environmental aspects of urbanisation in China, China’s climate change politics, climate governance at city level, energy and energy security politics, and renewable energy development. He has worked for the UN Food and Agriculture representative office in Beijing, China, and was the Co-Director of the China-EU Centre for Agricultural Technology (CECAT) in the Chinese Ministry of Agriculture. Dr. Oscar Almen is a research fellow at the Department of Government, Uppsala University, where he teaches courses on development studies and qualitative methods. He obtained his PhD from Gothenburg University with a study of China’s Local People’s Congresses. His research focuses on political participation, political accountability, local governance innovations, social movement, and state-civil society relations in China. His current research project examines regional political diversity in China based on relations between civil society and the local state in three Chinese municipalities. 

Dr. Yuan Ren is a Professor at Fudan University’s School of Social Development and Public Policy. He specializes in demography and urban studies, and has conducted several research projects and published on a wide range of topics that include population and development, aging studies, urbanization and migration, urban and regional development, urban affairs and welfare institution. 

Dr. Outi Louva works as a university lecturer at the Centre for East Asian Studies at the University of Turku, Finland. She is the vice director of the Centre and the director of the Finnish University Network for Asian Studies. Her PhD thesis dealt with ethnicity-based economic cooperation between China’s ethnic Korean areas and South Korea. Luova’s recent research has focused on China’s urban governance, especially on environmental issues.