The Political Economy of Low-carbon Energy Transition: the case of China 公开

Abstract

A primary question asked by scholars of central-local relations in authoritarian regimes is how policies decided at the national level are effectively implemented at the sub-national level. In China, the central government seeks to maintain local compliance through institutionalized political centralization and economic decentralization. However, sub-national actors still maintain substantial autonomy to vary implementation of central policies.

This thesis turns our attention to provincial leadership. I argue that the extent of policy implementation can be conceptualized as a result of interaction among province governors' career incentives, the province's state capacity, and economic interests. A province that has more state capacity has more bargaining power vis-a-vis the central government and local vested interests. Thus, given high capacity, governors seeking to maximize career advancement would endeavor to overcome both market and institutional barriers and develop a renewable-friendly framework. By doing so, province governments demonstrate not only compliance with central directives, but also policy competence and the ability to coordinate between interest groups and create new winning coalitions.

I test this theory by examining the case of renewable energy policy implementation in China. This thesis finds that while there is a general increasing in overall commitment to renewable energy over the period of 2001 to 2015, the variation across provinces increases. This shows that under the current institution, province governments are indeed responsive to shifts in central priority. Furthermore, governors with higher career incentives and has higher capacity are more committed. It can be argued that a highly motivated province governor with high state capacity is able to overcome economic interests to ensure the implementation of renewable energy policy.

This thesis also develops a new approach to analyzing province compliance to renewable energy policy. Given the political dynamics of Chinese policy making, current methodology is not suitable for analyzing policy compliance in China. Thus, for this thesis, I use methods of text-analysis to score province policies' commitment to renewable energy and created a Commitment to Renewable Index. This is used as a measure of province governor's willingness and likelihood to implement renewable energy policies.

Table of Contents

1. Introduction........................................................................................................................... 9

1.1. Research Design.............................................................................................................. 13

1.2. Thesis value added.......................................................................................................... 15

1.3. Thesis overview.............................................................................................................. 19

2. Literature Review................................................................................................................ 19

2.1. Administrative Structure................................................................................................. 19

2.2. Fragmented authoritarianism........................................................................................... 21

2.3. Central-Political relations................................................................................................ 23

2.6. Province Leadership....................................................................................................... 29

3. Theory................................................................................................................................... 35

3.1. Career incentives............................................................................................................. 35

3.2. State capacity.................................................................................................................. 37

3.3. Existing interests............................................................................................................. 38

4. China's Renewable Energy Development......................................................................... 40

4.1. Major Actors................................................................................................................... 42

4.2. Wind energy and solar energy development................................................................... 44

4.3. Incentivizing Province Governments.............................................................................. 45

4.4. Province Responses......................................................................................................... 51

5. Research Design: Commitment to Renewable Index....................................................... 51

5.1. The Model...................................................................................................................... 51

5.2. Dependent Variable: Commitment to Renewable Index................................................... 52

5.3. Components of the Index................................................................................................ 55

5.4. Scoring Criteria............................................................................................................... 58

5.5. Independent Variables: Career Incentives, Province capacity, Economic Interests........... 59

6. Results and Discussion....................................................................................................... 60

6.1. Commitment to Renewable Energy................................................................................. 60

6.1. Discussion of the model.................................................................................................. 63

6.2. Illustration: Inner Mongolia vs. Xinjiang........................................................................ 64

7. Conclusion............................................................................................................................ 66

7.1. Discussions and Limitations............................................................................................ 66

7.2. Conclusion...................................................................................................................... 68

8. Bibliography......................................................................................................................... 69

About this Master's Thesis

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School	Laney Graduate School
Department	Political Science
Degree	MA
Submission	Master's Thesis
Language	English
Research Field	Political Science, General
关键词	Central-local Relations Political Economy Renewable Energy Policy Low-carbon development China
Committee Chair / Thesis Advisor	Remington, Thomas F, Emory University
Committee Members	Gandhi, Jennifer, Emory University Saikawa, Eri , Emory University

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