23 April – Staging Markets: The Local Politics of Emissions Trading in China
Date: 23 April 2018
Time: 12:00pm
Location: Baker 129 Conference Room
Speaker: Iza Ding
Topic: Staging Markets: The Local Politics of Emissions Trading in China
Abstract: Why did the Chinese government, operating in a quasi-market economy, embrace cap-and-trade? How do localities respond to central advocacy of cap-and-trade, and what kinds of lessons can we generate about policy-making and implementation in China? In this paper I trace the directed experimentation with local cap-and-trade programs in China. I argue that poorly aligned local political economic incentives, combined with the local government’s need to fulfill policy targets, have created a situation in which emissions trading serves as “policy theater,” whereby political authorities recruit stakeholders to act out the key processes of a policy in order to convince the audience of the effectiveness of policy implementation. Localities then send inaccurate feedback to the central authorities, who in turn call for the policy’s further expansion based on perceived positive results. However, the lack of success in cap-and-trade pilots has meant that local initiatives to expand the policy have been few and far between.
