Abstract
The integration of climate mitigation into urbanization has brought new actors to city planning and building. This study examines the driving actors of decarbonization-focused urban development in a Global South context through the case of Shenzhen International Low-Carbon City (SILCC), China. It outlines a complex governing landscape that combines new genres of actors and traditional hierarchical relationships within the state system. The paper further elaborates on how this ostensible multilevel governance is used strategically as a new source of legitimation for mega development projects, indicating the shifting legitimacy foundation for urban development to new levels of governance and onto different actors in the era of climate change.
Introduction
Planners need a good sense of with and for whom they make plans, and this is even true when climate change becomes an overarching concept in urban imagination. The problem itself is controversial, let alone the variant impacts and responses proposed among different communities, social groups, industrial sectors, and political parties. Furthermore, new actors like big tech companies, energy startups, and financiers in carbon markets have increasingly defined particular urban climate solutions. Understanding who is engaged and what their motives and dynamics are can help planners not only produce effective climate action plans but also promote inclusive and just planning processes.
The “who” question is long established in urban politics studies (Dahl 1961) and has recently intrigued scholars in the emerging field of urban climate governance (van der Heijden 2019). This is partly because cities’ positioning as a promising climate solution hinges on the mobilization of a greater diversity of actors working in, on, and across cities. Moreover, the new actors and new forms of action organization redefine what “urban” and “urban governance” mean under the politics of “carbon control” (Jonas, Gibbs, and While 2011). Mainstream theory of multilevel climate governance spotlights an emergent landscape where the boundaries between public and private, local and national, state and nonstate, and domestic and international are transcended (Bulkeley and Schroeder 2012). Nevertheless, the connectedness and evenness indicated by this theory are questioned by the accumulating evidence on the significance of “endogenous factors” in determining urban climate action, especially in the Global South context (Carmin, Anguelovski, and Roberts 2012). Climate actors are clearly embedded within locally specific sociopolitical, technological, and biophysical circumstances, but the embedding process and its implications for the quality of urban climate governance has remained obscure.
The goal of this paper is to shed light on the diverse actors driving decarbonization-focused urban development within the traditionally authoritarian context of China. Through a case of low-carbon city (LCC) building in Shenzhen, the paper elaborates how new genres of actors were “fixed” into the traditional state hierarchies and how these actors became a new source of legitimation for development projects due to their environmental relevance and “multilevel” appearance. The findings were based on three field trips, a review of related government and project documents, and thirty-nine semi-structured interviews with key informants familiar with the program of Shenzhen International Low-Carbon City (SILCC).
As a “new city category” emerging over the past decade, the LCC and similar concepts such as “zero-carbon” and “carbon-neutral” cities gained ground with the mainstreaming of climate change mitigation into urban policy-making (Hodson and Marvin 2017). The LCC has received particular popularity in the Global South, where the rapid urbanization has witnessed a growing number of ambitious LCC projects such as Masdar City, the Rio de Janeiro Low-Carbon City Development Program, and the Low Carbon Cities Malaysia Program (Griffiths and Sovacool 2020). In China alone, more than 130 cities have set an LCC goal (China Society for Urban Studies 2014), raising questions about subjects and dynamics underlying this sudden and widespread passion for the low-carbon urbanism.
Recent studies have highlighted the diversification of actors in China’s general environmental and urban spheres (Shen, Luo, and Wu 2020; Webber and Han 2017). In the particular area of climate governance, some scholars make use of the Western theory of multilevel governance while duly acknowledging peculiar “Chinese characteristics” (Schreurs 2017; Westman, Broto, and Huang 2019). Questions arise then as to why and how the diversifying stakeholders are incorporated into the arguably authoritarian environmental state and what the outcomes are for urban climate mitigation. China is representative of the Global South countries in terms of environmental governance deeply influenced by international forces as well as a climate crisis compounded by the ongoing urbanization process. Meanwhile, Chinese cities have shown a particular interest in low-carbon development, as manifested in the LCC’s phenomenal growth. Therefore, China provides an intriguing case of governance complexity in the urban low-carbon transition.
The rest of the paper unfolds in the following way. Section “Accounting for New Actors in Low-Carbon Urban Development” critically reviews two established frameworks, including multilevel governance and urban growth coalitions, for conceptualizing the actors in China’s low-carbon urban development. Section “The Case and Research Method” explains the research design and methodological issues. Section “New Actors in the Low-Carbon Urbanism: The Case of the SILCC” delineates the new actors in the development of the SILCC, followed by section “Embedding Urban Climate Actors in Hierarchical Relationships,” which elaborates how these actors are embedded into China’s traditional state hierarchies and form new hierarchical relationships in climate governance. Subsequently, section “‘Multilevel Governance’ as New Sources of Legitimacy” investigates the use of “multilevel governance” as a new legitimation source for mega urban projects. The concluding section contextualizes this study’s findings within the broader literature and discusses potential directions for future research.
Accounting for New Actors in Low-Carbon Urban Development
With the increasingly recognized nexus between cities and climate change, many urban scholars have interrogated its implications for urban governance (Hodson and Marvin 2012; Jonas, Gibbs, and While 2011; Rutland and Aylett 2008). A particular line of inquiries has focused on the “who” question and identified a new set of actors beyond both the conventional urban domain and the established global framework of climate governance led by nation-states. Bulkeley and Betsill (2005; 2013, 144) theorized this complex governing landscape as “multilevel governance” to spotlight the “new spheres of authority and new roles for different levels of government” in addressing climate change. It is claimed that the boundaries between the state and the nonstate, domestic and international, and across different administrative levels are blurred by the “hybrid governing arrangements which operate in network terms” (Bulkeley 2005, 876). Subsequently, a growing body of literature has drawn attention to innovative climate partnerships and networks, indicating a collaborative style of delivering city-level climate action (Bäckstrand 2008).
Outside the original European setting, the theory of multilevel climate governance has been applied to the Global South countries such as China (Schreurs 2017). Despite the usefulness for identifying new environmental actors, the structurally different political and administrative systems, especially the lack of participatory and collaborative planning models, problematize this theoretical framework’s uncritical application in a context with less deliberative processes (Westman, Broto, and Huang 2019). In particular, the ambivalent authoritarian state obscures the space for private and civil actors to meaningfully participate in the related action (Schreurs 2011). An active state in climate governance is actually not unique to China or East Asian developmental state countries. For example, MacNeil and Paterson (2012) found a developmental state approach to new markets of alternative energy technologies in the United States. In this light, the multilevel governance theory presuming nonhierarchical scalar associations might underestimate the state-related factors that shape climate strategies even in the Global North context.
Beyond the specific field of climate governance, many efforts have been made to account for the pluralization of actors in China’s urban development and environmental governance using various theoretical frameworks such as fragmented authoritarianism (Mertha 2009), growth coalitions (Qian 2007), and the assemblage theory (Shen, Luo, and Wu 2020; Webber and Han 2017). Despite their different focuses, these works have consistently revealed a mixture of agents and dynamics under China’s transitional economy, with the state still occupying a leading position by strategically adapting to the emerging market and globalization forces. Of particular relevance to the LCC is the investigation into new forces shaping China’s urbanization after the 2007 global financial crisis. Sustainability-focused urban development is generally approached as a new stage of urbanization with the confluence of multiple environmental, political, economic, and social factors, of which the carbon reduction imperative is but one consideration.
The multipurpose LCC indicates the complex and potentially contested interests of different related actors. But existing research has mostly focused on the growth-hungry local government and its use of the LCC as a developmental instrument to facilitate land speculation as a major source of municipal financing (Chien 2013). This line of arguments remotely echoes the discussions about the driving actors of China’s urbanization through Molotch’s (1976) growth machine framework (e.g. Jiang, Waley, and Gonzalez 2016; Wu and Waley 2018; T. Zhang 2002; S. Zhang 2014). The land-driven actors in the LCC precisely correspond to the urban growth collations prevailing in Chinese cities. While the growth machine perspective can supplement the multilevel governance framework by uncovering the hidden developmental agenda and the significance of land in the low-carbon urbanism, the exclusive focus on the land-centered urban politics falls short of acknowledging the multifaceted goal of the local government, especially the increasing urgency of finding a balance between economic and environmental sustainability.
Also, the land-driven coalition renders insufficient to appreciate the “new developmentalism,” which is characterized by “revitalised and refocused forms of state capacity aimed at realizing the transformative economic objectives associated with sustainable development” (Dent 2018, 1192). Furthermore, the low-carbon economy reinvents the developmental state because the required technological innovation fits well with its goals of continued economic growth and technological advancement (Wong 2012). In light of China’s ongoing process of “experimentation under hierarchy” toward green and low-carbon urban development, the relationship between the state and the new environmental actors can become extraordinarily sophisticated (Miao and Lang 2015). Consequently, a more nuanced perspective is needed to account for the emergent coalitions in decarbonization-oriented urban development. The strategic nature of low-carbon urbanism as not only a climate solution but also a development strategy, as well as the increasing dominance of a technocratic culture in this sphere, can fundamentally influence the processes and outcomes of urban coalition formation. And the way in which this occurs in China’s transitional context is of particular significance to counteract the current bias toward developed countries in urban climate governance scholarship (van der Heijden 2019).
The Case and Research Method
This research is based on a detailed case study of the SILCC. As China’s first Special Economic Zone (SEZ), Shenzhen has led the country’s economic development and played as a forerunner in environmental and climate governance. In 2010, it was designated as a national LCC pilot by the National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC), one of the most powerful central agencies responsible for economic planning and, more recently, climate policy-making and international negotiation. The Shenzhen Medium- and Long-Term Low-Carbon Development Plan (2011–2020) runs as the country’s first city-level climate mitigation plan. According to the plan, Shenzhen’s low-carbon transformation will feature a collection of low-carbon areas including the SILCC. In 2015, the SILCC was named as the flagship project of the EU-China Partnership on Urbanization. Consequently, the development of SILCC has involved a variety of domestic and international actors.
The central question in this research concerns who these actors were, what roles they played, how they interacted with one another, and why they joined and left the project at particular points in time. The objective is to identify the nature of new environmental actors and their relationship with an authoritarian, development-minded state, and an urban regime that has produced the most massive urbanization in human history. Information about the driving actors in the SILCC was collected from both primary and secondary sources. First was interview with thirty-nine key informants, including officials of different levels of government and public agencies, employees in academic and professional institutions, staff working in state-owned and private enterprises, critical members of local communities and organizations, and representatives of domestic and international nongovernmental organizations (NGOs). These interview participants were recruited through a snowball sampling strategy, starting with a manager of an arms-length real estate development company and a planning scholar who joined the Paulson Institute to give its 2014 Prize for Cities of the Future to the SILCC. Interview invitations went to forty-six persons with promises that all answers would be recorded under pseudonyms and reported anonymously. Eventually, thirty-nine persons accepted the invitation. The semi-structured interviews, which lasted 1.5 to 2.5 hours each, allowed the participants to specify particular important issues while staying within a framework.
Another source of information was event attendance and observation. A series of SILCC Forum accompanied the progress of the project since 2013. Each year, the half-week Forum happened on site and featured a series of keynote addresses, panel discussions, and various side-events such as exhibitions, campaigns, and guide tours open to the public. To market the SILCC and Shenzhen as a whole, the Forum engaged local, national, and foreign media outlets and a diverse organizing committee. Each member of this committee took on one of the four different titles, including (1) host, (2) counsel, (3) organizer, and (4) co-organizer. Following the typical government mega-event organization in China, the different titles indicate varying roles and positions in the Forum and the general SILCC (see Table 1). Therefore, the roster can provide an entry point to identify the key stakeholders in the SILCC.
Key Actors in the SILCC Forum.
Source: Multiple sources compiled by author.
Note: NDRC = National Development and Reform Commission; MOHURD = Ministry of Housing and Urban-Rural Development; UPLRC = Urban Planning, Land, and Resources Commission; UPDIS = Urban Planning and Design Institute of Shenzhen; IBR = Institute of Building Research; SILCC = Shenzhen International Low-Carbon City; SSEZCDC = Shenzhen Special Economic Zone Construction and Development Corporation.
An interesting finding was the constantly evolving committee over time. In some cases, a single entity assumed different titles across different years. In others, an entity appeared only in particular years. While four entities were consistently present between 2013 and 2017, another twenty-three entities got on board in at least one year. Considering the strategic use of mega-events as an innovative urbanization strategy in China (Lin and Xu 2019), it is reasonable to assume that the evolving committee reflects the shifting interests and power relations within the project. Subsequently, a review of secondary materials, including plans and professional consulting reports, media coverage, and project-related government documents, proceeded with particular attention drawn to these different players’ roles and the particular moments of one’s (in)activity. Furthermore, the author attended the Forum between 2015 and 2017 to collect information on-site through many informal conversations and participant observation.
The single case study here unavoidably raises questions regarding the type of the case and the extent to which it can be generalized. First, this particular project presents some general characteristics of China’s LCCs, such as (1) being led by a municipal government, (2) a focus on new construction and infrastructure (building and transportation) development, and (3) involvement of international actors. Furthermore, the SILCC has become an example of best practice through multiple national awards and a flagship status under various international programs initiated by the World Bank, World Wildlife Fund (WWF), and Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC). Therefore, it can be anticipated that this project’s approaches would transfer to other places both within and beyond China, making the SILCC a more representative case. More importantly, as discussed in the following sections, the SILCC presents a particularly complex governing landscape, which provides an exceptional opportunity to explore the research questions raised in this study. In this light, the selected case is moderately “representative” and highly “revelatory” (Yin 2003).
New Actors in the Low-Carbon Urbanism: The Case of the SILCC
With a total area of 53.4 km2, the SILCC has a long time horizon with an unspecific completion date. Since the launch in 2012, early implementation concentrated in a 1-km2 central zone with priority given to infrastructure improvement, industrial upgrading, and beautification of the built environment. Because there was initially only a conceptual plan laying out a general vision, this stage also featured a continuous process of plan-making concerning transportation, land use, economic development, and environmental amelioration. Therefore, a diverse group of experts and professionals in these areas occupied a prominent position. The SILCC distinguished from an “ordinary” project in multiple ways relating to both subjects and objects of planning. Remarkably, the engagement of various international actors, the central government, and professionals beyond the traditional urban planning domain featured the SILCC as a climate-related project.
International Actors: The More, the Better?
International reputation was one of the major considerations behind the SILCC (Cheshmehzangi, Xie, and Tan-Mullins 2018). In fact, the high expectation of demonstrating China’s commitment to climate governance through this particular project largely explained the central government’s support and engagement. 1 Before that, international actors played a facilitative role in securing the central government’s political commitment through, for example, a 2011 letter from the then Dutch Vice Premier to the Chinese Minister of Science and Technology (MST) suggesting project-based government-to-government collaboration. This letter was directly related to the engagement of multiple Dutch actors, such as the Next Generation Infrastructure Foundation, Delft University of Technology, Dynamic City Foundation, and TNO, in planning the project.
While international planning consultancy had been a frequent ingredient in China’s eco-cities (Wu 2015), the SILCC set itself apart by involving a wider range of international actors from foreign governments, universities and research institutions, foundations, as well as the private sector. Moreover, the joint venture between these Dutch actors and a local university with a long-standing voice in Shenzhen’s policy-making distinguished them from independent foreign consultants. To signify the joint planning, the city government named the project as Sino-Dutch Low-Carbon City and identified international cooperation as one of the project’s objectives.
But as the final name SILCC indicated, the Dutch actors lost their dominance as the project entered into implementation. This was in part because Shenzhen’s expectation of additional resources from the Dutch partners, especially in the form of financial investment, crumbled as the proposal of a college town with new campuses of Dutch universities lost momentum. 2 Furthermore, the NDRC’s decision on a non-Dutch-specific project name and the later designation of the SILCC as the flagship of the EU-China Partnership on Urbanization invited a broader scope of actors, who collectively diluted the presence of the Dutch participants. These actors were engaged not only in plan-making but also in real estate development and hosting the Forum and other events. Together with traditional international organizations, new transnational climate networks such as C40 and World Alliance for Low Carbon Cities played a strategic role in boosting the project’s international profile and drawing worldly known climate activists to the Forum. Furthermore, the hundreds of attending foreign media outlets greatly enhanced the SILCC’s visibility on a global scale. On multiple occasions, such as the 2012 World Cities Summit Mayors Forum and the 2015 United Nations (UN) climate change conference, the SILCC was presented as a pioneering effort toward climate mitigation by Chinese cities. In this regard, international actors, especially those committed to climate protection, added symbolic value as well as technical and financial assistance to the SILCC.
The Central Government as an Enabler and Intermediator
Compared to the traditional urban growth coalition led by the local government, the SILCC alliance was characterized by the involvement of government bodies at higher levels. In particular, two central agencies, including the NDRC and the Ministry of Housing and Urban-Rural Development (MOHURD), played a vital role in promoting the project through the Forum and key officials’ visits to the project site. While the former charged national climate policy-making and economic planning, the latter had a stake in LCC development due to its established authority over urbanization and other related issues such as the national green building standard and certification. The MOHURD’s eco-city program paralleled the NDRC’s LCC program, and both of these programs enlisted Shenzhen as a national pilot. This overlapped authority reflected the conceptualization of climate change as more of an economic development and urbanization issue than an environmental one in national policy-making. This point could also be seen from the absence of the environmental bureaus in the SILCC.
To a large extent, the city’s pilot position prepared its LCC practice for receiving particular attention from the related central agencies. On the other side, the central government’s patronage was also a result as well as a factor of international cooperation in the SILCC. Following the Dutch government’s proposal for bilateral cooperation on the then Sino-Dutch Low-Carbon City, the NDRC took various measures to enhance the project’s international profile, ranging from renaming the project as the SILCC to designating it as the flagship of the EU-China Partnership on Urbanization. Furthermore, the presentation at international events such as the UN conferences was enabled by the NDRC, which led China’s climate negotiation under the existing global framework based on nation-states. In this sense, the central government played as an intermediary between the local initiative of SILCC and global climate governance.
As a project backed by the central government, the SILCC obtained privilege in national resource allocation. For example, it obtained the Special Funding for Energy Saving and Emission Reduction jointly administered by the NDRC and the Ministry of Finance. The NDRC and its climate division constantly participated in the annual Forum as a host and then a counsel, indicating its unwavering political commitment to the project. Furthermore, the political attention received by the SILCC helped it attract many state-related actors, such as state-owned energy companies, national research centers, and nationally recognized high-tech firms. These actors played as drivers of particular on-site projects (e.g. a new waste-to-energy plant, micro-grid system), think tanks assisting the city’s climate policy-making, and new residents in the SILCC area to promote its industrial restructuring toward high-tech and the general tertiary sector.
While the central government’s engagement brought about a favorable political environment and various resources to advance the SILCC, the project served the national agenda of local climate experimentation on the other way. In Shenzhen’s LCC national pilot plan, the SILCC was designated as a city-level “pilot” to experiment with low-carbon development. Such a “cascading” piloting process toward creating more local-scale strategies served the central government’s goal of identifying “best practices” of climate mitigation. 3 Therefore, an alliance was formed in the SILCC between the central and local governments to cultivate, build, and demonstrate climate experiments for an audience of other Chinese cities as well as the international community. This win-win situation deriving from the experimental and demonstrative value of the SILCC laid the foundation for an ostensible multilevel climate governance.
New Environmental Actors: How “New” They Are?
The development of the SILCC also involved a new set of actors with an environmental/climate background. They first included various experts and professionals, such as scholars of low-carbon economy, experts in new energy technologies, architects with a green building design expertise, and specialists in public transit development. They were distributed across different sectors and entities. As a result, multiple plans focusing on the building, transportation, infrastructure, and energy sectors included carbon-specific planning, which calculated carbon emissions from the SILCC based on particular development models. The required knowledge and techniques, which extended beyond the traditional practice of urban planning and development, called in new personnel and a shifting balance of influences of different sectors.
In addition to plan-making, these actors were active in the Forum and other project activities. For example, the Harbin Institute of Technology (Shenzhen Campus), which prepared the conceptual plan jointly with the Dutch consultants, independently drafted the project annual report. Its affiliated International Academy of Low Carbon Development became a co-organizer of the SILCC Forum as the single academic institution in the organization committee. Another case in point was the Shenzhen Institute of Building Research (IBR), the architecture firm leading three signature green buildings in the center of the SILCC. It also played as the operator of the on-site Conference and Exhibition Center and an organizer of the Forum. As a local private firm, the IBR also persuaded the project leaders to adopt mandatory green building codes in the SILCC, indicating its significant influence on the project. 4
Besides, some established private sector actors became a particular type of “new” climate actors by virtue of their green businesses. For example, established automobile manufacturer BYD Auto and real estate developer Vanke, both of which had headquarters in Shenzhen, obtained a prominent position in the SILCC Forum due to their nationally leading electric vehicle and green building businesses. In exchange for its transportation service during the Forum, BYD was allowed to advertise its products on site. For Vanke, maintaining a good relationship with the local government was extremely important, considering the state-dominated land system. As two leading actors in the traditional urban growth coalitions, real estate developers and the local government sustained their alliance under the ascending low-carbon agenda through green development projects such as the SILCC. Therefore, becoming a “climate” actor through partaking in climate-related urban initiatives composed a business strategy for private sector actors.
New climate actors also included international and domestic environmental NGOs as well as climate networks. Some of them were old partners of the city government. For instance, as the single Forum organizer from the domestic civil sector, Shenzhen Green Low-Carbon Development Foundation had been a stable provider of policy advisory service to the city. The SILCC was thus a continuation of its existent alliance with the municipal government. There were also some new national climate networks, such as China Champions for Climate Action (C Team) and China Low Carbon Action League, joining the SILCC Forum. Although their co-organizer title indicated a less important role, these municipal networks served to promote the SILCC as a national “best practice” and “exemplar.” 5 The project’s growing impact was reflected in a record of awards, which symbolized the success of the project and Shenzhen as a whole in the low-carbon transition.
Finally, the SILCC witnessed a broad range of climate and environmental policy advocates, including leaders of the ad hoc SILCC task force within the municipal government, top officials in the involved central agencies, and climate activists within and outside the country. These actors were highlighted as keynote speakers in the Forum. To a large extent, they symbolized the SILCC’s environmental significance and essentially played as public advocates of the project. Through their individual influence and reputation, the SILCC became a more broadly recognized climate initiative rather than an “ordinary” urban development project with green characteristics.
Embedding Urban Climate Actors in Hierarchical Relationships
Instead of a “complex (and nonhierarchical) scalar associations of multiple levels of governments” (Rice 2010, 931), the interactions between different actors in the SILCC reflected the operation of particular hierarchies that corresponded to the existing top-down government system. This was most evident in the strategic role played by the central government. In addition to direct national resource allocation, central agencies also enabled the SILCC’s international influence and access to broader international cooperation via enlisting the project as a pilot or flagship under the formal international frameworks for climate and other governing issues. The power relations featuring a top-down system also existed at more local levels. While the SILCC was officially announced as a joint project between the city and the district governments, the supervisor-subordinate relationship between them made the former the absolute decision-maker in the project. After the district government conceived the Sino-Dutch Low-Carbon City and successfully secured the city’s support, it ironically lost much of the power to shape the project with a national and then international profile. In practice, it operated as an agent of the city-level ad hoc task force to communicate with local residents and businesses on the project-related issues. 6 Despite a “bottom-up” initiative at the beginning, the project was increasingly subject to the vertical hierarchy defined by the top-down system as a result of its growing political significance.
Additionally, a horizontal hierarchy was found in the interdepartmental SILCC task force, which largely reflected the existing power relations within the government. As the city-level agent of the NDRC, the Shenzhen Development and Reform Commission (DRC) occupied the most prominent position because of its newly delegated climate authority as well as its long-established power to determine public investments in infrastructure development. Moreover, significant urban projects such as new rail transit lines and power stations must be approved by the DRC at particular levels according to project size and scale. As the LCC building combined the governance of climate mitigation and urban infrastructure development, it fell primarily into the DRC’s authority sphere. Therefore, the task force arranged its operation office within the Shenzhen DRC, with a DRC leader playing as deputy director of the SILCC. Another influential power in the task force, the Urban Planning, Land, and Resources Commission (UPLRC), was also a long-standing power in the urbanization process due to its authority over land-use planning and land resource allocation. While other agencies, such as the Water Affairs Bureau and the Technology and Innovation Commission, were purposefully included for their particular relevance and potential contribution to LCC building, they came to at best a secondary place in determining the SILCC. The dominance of the DRC and UPLRC mostly resembled the dynamics within the traditional land-centered urban growth coalitions dominating China’s urbanization, indicating the sustained significance of infrastructure and land development in the low-carbon urbanism.
The hierarchical relationships were definitely not limited to the public actors. Indeed, the power relations identified within the government system were mirrored in nonpublic sectors, with actors associated with higher levels of the government or more powerful branches exerting greater influence in the SILCC. For example, the Urban Planning and Design Institute of Shenzhen (UPDIS) and the Shenzhen Center for Public Art, both of which were previously supervised by the UPLRC, acted respectively as the leading planner and the organizer of related planning/design competitions. Furthermore, the city government’s arms-length developer was given more priority to access the most prime locations in the SILCC than its counterpart at the district level.
Despite the diversifying actors and the inclusion of private and civil sectors across different scales, the prevalent hierarchical relationships, as illustrated above, indicated the substantial distinction between the practice in the SILCC and the multilevel climate governance in the Western context. In particular, the SILCC hinged on a pool of development resources that were exclusively owned or controlled by the state due to the legacy of the planned economy and the existing top-down system. These resources included material assets such as land and public investment as well as immaterial treasures such as preferential policy and symbolic value of political support from the top. Moreover, as the existing global framework for climate governance was still based on the national state, a national government in a top-down system became an intermediator between “local” climate experiments and “global” climate cooperation. In this sense, the state, especially the central state, “allowed” city-level climate action to be seen by an international community of climate change.
The enabling role played by the central government is not a unique characteristic of the SILCC. Instead, it has become a frequent ingredient of successful LCC and similar eco-city projects in China. For example, the Sino-Singapore Tianjin Eco-City and Sino-German Qingdao Ecopark are both products of government-to-government cooperation between China and another country. The central government’s deep involvement largely distinguishes alliances in the eco- and low-carbon urbanism from traditional land-driven urban growth coalitions. For the latter, the central government is generally an opposing force to the local government’s growth strategies for environmental and other reasons (S. Zhang 2014), while aligning with national priorities is strategically used to offset it by some successful coalitions (Jiang, Waley, and Gonzalez 2016; Qian 2007). As decarbonization rises to a new national priority, which is made clear by China’s climate mitigation commitments since the 2009 Copenhagen summit, it is leveraged as an urban strategy to frame and justify local development ambitions. A consequence of this convergence of interests is the recentralization of the state power, with the central government functioning like an “urban” climate actor. Therefore, inherent hierarchical relationships within the state system are reinforced rather than removed in the low-carbon urbanism in China’s context.
“Multilevel Governance” as New Sources of Legitimacy
The question then arises as to what sort of impacts are produced by the ostensible multilevel governance in LCC building. Does the diversification of actors mean a different, hopefully more inclusive, approach to city building under the framework of climate change and low-carbon transition? In the case of the SILCC, it is worth noting that the new actors brought with them distinct flows of resources that were explicitly required by the project’s low-carbon framing and decarbonization objective. These new resources included cutting-edge planning ideas about cities in a changing climate, knowledge and skills of carbon calculation and modeling, green technologies and specialists of their applications, and financial investments committed to environmental goals. What was equally, if not more, important was a collective narrative about the connection between this particular project and the global climate agenda, and this was provided by a “discourse coalition” of climate change formed between actors across different levels of governance, different sectors, as well as national boundaries (Bulkeley 2000). In this sense, “multilevel governance” accentuated the project’s climate relevance.
This climate relevance was readily translated into political significance due to the emerging national priority for climate change mitigation. As the SILCC acquired an extraordinary political status, it was treated as an “exceptional” urban megaproject with distance from normal politics (Orueta and Fainstein 2008). The consequent “climate exceptionalism” justified not only preferential policy and favorable resource allocation but also exemption from existing regulations in urban development activities. A prominent example was the land sector. To accommodate the development demand of the SILCC, the city provided exceptional treatment in the form of streamlined approval and permitting, ad hoc rezoning, and land allocation that bypassed the auction procedures required by the Land Management Law. These informal and quasi-formal land practices used to be common tools used by urban growth coalitions to boost urbanization and land revenue generation (Jiang, Waley, and Gonzalez 2016). But new land policy since the 2000s, as well as anticorruption measures under Xi’s Administration, raised the difficulties and political risks associated with these practices, which needed additional justification to proceed. The alignment with the national agenda of climate mitigation helped justify the SILCC’s privilege of favorable land policy. Hence, the climate relevance worked for rather than against the traditional style of land-driven, “growth-oriented” urban planning and practice (Wu 2015).
So far, it is clear that the ostensible multilevel governance served as a new source of legitimacy in China’s urban development in two steps. First, due to the mainstreaming of the multilevel governance theory and international policy transfer, this particular governing mode has become a normative feature of local climate action. This does not necessarily mean that all such action must assume a multilevel characteristic, but that the involvement of diverse actors, or the appearance of multilevel governance, would make a project more like a climate initiative. In this light, the “climatization of the urban environment” happens not only in technical terms but also along political and discursive dimensions (Rice 2010, p. 932). After the climate relevance is established, it quickly turns into a sense of “climate exceptionalism” that justifies a project’s privileged status and exemption from formal regulations and institutions. This second step is related to the dual factors of an emerging national priority and a top-down system in China. Nevertheless, political commitment and deep engagement of the national state are more broadly observed in green megaprojects in developing countries (Rizzo 2020), indicating the potential leverage of environmental politics to achieve national goals of development and urbanization. Nascent norms of global climate politics—in this case, the multilevel governance—therefore form a strategic step to legitimating and establishing exceptionality in urbanization in the Global South.
This legitimation mechanism calls for a reconsideration of the technocratic culture dominating the low-carbon urbanism (Hodson and Marvin 2017). As climate-related expertise, such as carbon accounting and scenario modeling, is used to demonstrate the climate relevance and thus political significance of particular planning activities and development projects, the symbolic value of the involved experts and professionals questions the thesis of depoliticizing climate change as the post-political discourse indicates (Swyngedouw 2009). On the other side, the exclusion of the general public is largely hidden by a superficial pluralism. As partnership and collaboration become an end rather than a means to more inclusive urban climate strategies (van der Heijden 2019), expanded project coalitions bring about a participatory image, even though the new actors can fail to represent dissenting or previously unheard voices. In this light, the relationship between a multiactor characteristic, or an ostensible “multilevel governance,” and the inclusiveness of urban climate action is open to different possibilities.
Conclusion
While the low-carbon urbanism entails “empowering new strategic alliances in urban politics” (Jonas, Gibbs, and While 2011, 2539), it is still obscure what sorts of alliances are formed and how alliance dynamics unfold in different sociopolitical contexts. This study investigated the development process of an LCC in Shenzhen, China, to identify the key actors driving the decarbonization-focused urbanization. It spotlighted a variety of new actors compared to the typical Chinese urban growth coalition. These “newcomers” included not only climate scientists and experts, green technology firms, energy sector players, and transnational climate networks but also a more active central government, especially the agency for climate policy-making and economic planning, in promoting a local development project. Furthermore, this paper illustrated how these actors were embedded in the traditional state hierarchies. As a result, particular dynamics formed within the expanding urban decarbonization alliances that reasserted the power of the central state and empowered actors who aligned with its climate change agenda.
This peculiar governing landscape signifies the strategic nature of LCC development in China and remotely echoes the “state entrepreneurialism” thesis that points to a strange combination of apparently contradictory elements of the developmental state and the urban entrepreneurialism (Wu 2018). The findings in this paper also raise serious questions for the mainstream multilevel governance theory in conceptualizing subnational climate action in a Global South context. Instead of a nonhierarchical arrangement with blurred boundaries between the state and the nonstate, the expansive urban climate coalitions can be absorbed into a top-down system where an authoritarian state is present. Moreover, as partnership and collaboration become a normative feature of climate governance, diversifying actors can be used to demonstrate the validity of particular projects. This symbolic value and possible instrumental use of a “superficial” multilevel governance as a new legitimacy source, as the case in this study shows, cautions against the uncritical application of the multilevel framework and a romanticized imagination about collaborative approaches to climate planning.
The findings in this study also speak to the ongoing debate about the nature of China’s local growth coalitions. As new environmental actors introduce a distinct set of carbon-specific language, techniques, and calculations into development rationales, the land-centered urban politics adapt to a politics of “carbon control” in a Chinese way whereby land practice is “carbonized” for political as well as technological reasons. In the studied case here, the project’s climate significance as exemplified by its quantified mitigation potential justified the informal and quasi-formal land practices to facilitate the implementation. While members of the traditional land-driven growth coalition, such as the local state and public and private developers, still occupied a prominent position in the LCC alliance, they depended on a wide array of new environmental actors to receive special, favorable treatment. This “climate exceptionalism” points to the shifting legitimacy foundation and new carbon rationalities of city building in the era of climate change. Considering the inherent limitations of the case method used in the current study, further empirical evidence is needed to identify the extent to which this particular trend appears in other places within and beyond China.
The phenomenal growth of low-carbon cities in China provides an intriguing case of the coevolving urban land and climate politics in the rapidly urbanizing Global South. So this study can serve as an entry point to exploring the new dynamics and alliances in the decarbonization-focused urbanization. Future research can further investigate the interactions between new climate actors and the established interests in the urban domain and the resultant power relations of the climate urbanism. In particular, the prevalent hierarchical relationships in the studied LCC alliance indicate the persistent functioning rather than withdrawal of the state system. The state’s leading role and its penetration into and interaction with a technocratic planning model might have profound implications for the outcomes, especially the inclusiveness and justice, of urban climate strategies, and can be tested in the broader East Asian developmental state context.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
My sincere thanks to Robert Beauregard for his thoughtful feedback on the original version of this article. Helpful comments from George Lin and Atul Pokharel are also gratefully acknowledged. In addition, I am grateful to the organizers of and all participants in the Journal of Planning Education and Research 2019 writing workshop for their support and input. Finally, I would like to thank the anonymous reviewers for their constructive comments and suggestions.
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: The preparation and revision of this paper have been supported by the grants obtained from the Research Grants Council of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region (SAR) (GRF 17614218 and CRF C7028-16G) and the Contemporary China Strategic Research Theme of the Faculty of Social Sciences, the University of Hong Kong.
