Implementing a Low-Carbon Future

In an era of intensified geopolitics and of national-level political gridlock, subnational governments can potentially play an essential role in combating global climate change. Can subnational governments introduce and sustain climate policy actions through changes in political leadership? How can we understand why some local areas have, and continue to, deliver on their climate goals while other areas may have set goals but have struggled to deliver them?

Despite being the world's largest carbon emitter, China has pledged to attain peak carbon before 2030 and carbon neutrality before 2060. Since the early 2010s, Beijing has selected more than one hundred local low-carbon pilots at municipal and provincial levels to engage in policy experimentation. Their aim is policy solutions to decouple local economic growth from increased use of fossil fuels. In Implementing a Low-Carbon Future, Weila Gong examines four cases of such policy experimentation and finds that local implementation outcomes were mixed. Notably, Gong finds variation in levels of low-carbon policy institutionalization across the case studies. This includes varying successes of the standards, regulations, and laws put into place through these policy experiments.

Based on original research including over 100 expert interviews, comparative case studies, and process-tracing of four low-carbon city pilots, Gong opens the black box of the subnational climate policy process in China's centralized political system and identifies mid-level local bureaucrats as playing an essential "bridge leader" role in bringing about implementation successes.