China in the Climate Change Regime Complex: The Efficiency of the Climate Change Regime Complex and the Bottom-up Approach

Abstract

In recent years, the idea of regime complex for climate change has become popularised. The influential work of Oran Young (2004) has shown how ‘mechanism theory’ might explain the influence of international regimes on a country’s behaviour. The purpose of this study is to test the utility of a “regime complex for climate change” (Keohane & Victor, 2009) for enhancing the capacity of states to embrace the building of renewable energy industries. Nowhere is the need to combat climate change (CC) more evident than in the case of China. The degradation of the environment and more frequent occurrence of natural disasters has significantly influenced the lives of the Chinese people and the security of this country. By focusing on three constituents of the international regime for CC, I seek to show that China’s participation in these areas has played a significant role in China’s efforts to build renewable energy technology industries. China, as the largest emitter of CO2 has been criticized as one of the laggards, which blocked the negotiation process of an international legally binding agreement. Though under huge social pressure, China does not show too much enthusiasm slowing down its economic development for the sake of combating global climate change. In this sense, focusing on energy innovation is a promising way of pursuing the goals of greening the growing (economically) as a ground breaking study by John Mathews and Hao Tan (2015) in Nature journals has recently shown. A research on the climate change regime’s influence on China and China’s participation in the climate change regime is of strategic importance as well. The International regime for climate change has shaped the Chinese government’s cost-and-benefit calculations in agreeing to emissions targets and peaking year, China’s role and identity with regards to the country’s views on the environment-economy relationship, and provided opportunities for China to cooperate with others in a constructive manner, which would otherwise not have been available. At the same time, we cannot ignore the specific characteristics of domestic sectors also matter in explaining variations in China’s responses. Importantly, at the same time, China’s participation in climate clubs only contributes indirectly to China’s energy innovation capacity while national initiative and bilateral cooperation between China and other countries contribute directly to enhance it. The discussion of the bottom-up approach in this thesis indicates that the bottom-up approach is applied in all the three sectors investigated in this thesis. This approach is carried out with strong unitary political system in the national initiative. In the bilateral cooperation, it was adopted with strong governmental guidance. And the bottom-up approach is considered well adopted by the climate clubs. The project networks established by clubs have put many private entities, governments, individuals on the same platform and intend to make a difference at the project level. The findings make three key contributions. First by demonstrating the influence of international regimes on state behaviour, the study seeks to bring a “system-level” perspective to the studies of China’s leading role in the building of renewable energy technology industries, even the most important works of the field such as Mathew’s work (2015) focus overwhelmingly on the quality of the country’s domestic institutions especially on the role of Chinese state, while playing down international factors in bringing about China’s renewable energy revolution. Second, China’s response to the international CC regime challenges the perspective of so many studies in international system-level analyses. While writers in this field take seriously the role of international regimes on state behaviour, a widely held view amongst such writers is the international factors have little effectiveness on China and other large carbon emitting states. Indeed, by specifying the conditions for varying levels of the international climate change regime’s effects on sectors within China, I seek to show why domestic sectoral characteristics matter a great deal in explaining not only weaker effects of international on the domestic (which is the preoccupation of writers in this Field), but why there are some times stronger effects on state behaviour. Third, by combining the regime theory and polycentric approach this thesis manages to study two variables within the 3 chosen regime constituents: the role in enhancing China’s energy innovation capacity and the status of adopting the bottom-up approach.