China Experiments Florini, Ann M; Lai, Hairong; Tan, Yeling
01/2012
eBook
All societies face a key question: how to empower governments to perform essential governmental functions while constraining the arbitrary exercise of power. This balance, always in flux, is ...particularly fluid in today's China. This insightful book examines the changing relationship between that state and its society, as demonstrated by numerous experiments in governance at subnational levels, and explores the implications for China's future political trajectory.
Ann Florini, Hairong Lai, and Yeling Tan set their analysis at the level of townships and counties, investigating the striking diversity of China's exploration into different governance tools and comparing these experiments with developments and debates elsewhere in the world. China Experiments draws on multiple cases of innovation to show how local authorities are breaking down traditional models of governance in responding to the challenges posed by the rapid transformations taking place across China's economy and society. The book thus differs from others on China that focus on dynamics taking place at the elite level in Beijing, and is unique in its broad but detailed, empirically grounded analysis.
The introduction examines China's changing governance architecture and raises key overarching questions. It addresses the motivations behind the wide variety of experiments underway by which authorities are trying to adapt local governance structures to meet new demands. Chapters 2-5 then explore each type of innovation in detail, from administrative streamlining and elections to partnerships in civil society and transparency measures. Each chapter explains the importance of the experiment in terms of implications for governance and draws upon specific case studies. The final chapter considers what these growing numbers of experiments add up to, whether China is headed towards a stronger more resilient authoritarianism or evolving towards its own version of democracy, and suggests a series of criteria by which China's political trajectory can be assessed.
Contents
1. China at a Crossroads
2. Streamlining the State
3. The Evolution of Voting Mechanisms
4. Civil Society
5. From Local Experiments to National Rules: China Lets the Sunshine In
6. Where is China Going?
The advent of the UN's Sustainable Development Goals has refocused global attention on the roles of business and other nonstate actors in achieving global goals. Often, business involvement takes the ...form of collaborations with the more traditional actors-governments and non-governmental organizations. Although such partnerships for development have been seen before, the scale and expectations are new. This paper explores how and why these cross-sector collaborations are evolving, and what steps can or should be taken to ensure that partnerships create public and private value. The arguments are illustrated with reference to cases of market-driven partnerships for agriculture in Southeast Asia that are intended to engage marginalized smallholder farmers in global value chains in agriculture. The aims of these cross-sector collaborations coincide with several targets of the Sustainable Development Goals such as poverty alleviation, decreasing environmental impact, and achieving food security. This is a hard case for mechanisms intended to protect public interests, given that the target beneficiaries (low-income smallholder farmers and the environment) are unable to speak effectively for themselves. We find that structures and processes to align interests in ways that protect the public interest are both necessary and feasible, though not easy to achieve.
It is no longer possible to understand public policy without focusing intensively on the public roles of the business sector. The world is awash in experimental private governance, from corporate ...codes of conduct, to demands for disclosure of private sector environmental and social impacts, to 'social enterprises' that aim to save the world the profitable way. Such experiments are emerging within Asia, changing the terms of the social licence to operate as society becomes more adept at making demands for good corporate citizenship and as the natural resource crisis begins to hit home. And as Asian corporations go global, they encounter new standards for social responsibility. Yet far too little is known about the status of these trends in Asia and how the debates over corporate responsibility, developed in a Western context, might translate given the very different relationships among government, business and society in the region. This article explores practice and theory to uncover what is already known and how to frame further research. It concludes by laying out a research agenda to analyse how the public roles of the private sector in Asia are evolving, and why they matter.
The International Energy Agency (IEA) is the organization that, despite its constrained membership, is as close as the world currently comes to a global focal point on the key energy governance ...arenas. Although when the IEA was established in the 1970s it had the specific and limited purpose of enabling the world’s leading oil consumers to undertake collective action in response to oil supply shocks, it now finds itself at the center of many of the key developments in global energy governance. Its evolution and current challenges reflect the key themes of this special issue: the competition between state and market, the emergence of multipolarity, the particular growing importance of Asia and the rise of climate change on the agenda of key tasks needing governance. The article focuses on where the agency now fits in the larger global energy governance panoply.
Policy Implications
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The IEA’s highly successful partnership with the G8 will not easily extend to the G20, given the latter’s much more diverse membership and interests. Both the IEA and the G20 governments should look to the experience of the G8’s ‘tasking’ of the IEA for ideas about how to advance the G20 agenda on energy.
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The IEA’s governing board should systematically assess the agency’s role as a linchpin in a variety of energy‐related regimes and consider how to ensure that the IEA is adequately resourced so that it can fill these multiple roles.
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The IEA’s affiliation with the OECD should be reassessed to facilitate the agency’s engagement with major emerging oil consumers, particularly India and China.
This article conceptualizes the energy problems facing society from a global governance perspective. It argues that a notion of “global energy governance,” taken to mean international collective ...action efforts undertaken to manage and distribute energy resources and provide energy services, offers a meaningful and useful framework for assessing energy-related challenges. The article begins by exploring the concepts of governance, global governance, and global energy governance. It then examines some of the existing institutions in place to establish and carry out rules and norms governing global energy problems and describes the range of institutional design options available to policymakers. It briefly traces the role of a selection of these institutions, from inter-governmental organizations to summit processes to multilateral development banks to global action networks, in responding to energy issues, and points out their strengths and weaknesses. The article concludes by analyzing how the various approaches to global governance differ in their applicability to addressing the conundrums of global energy problems.
International Relations (IR) scholarship is directly in the path of two simultaneous tidal waves. The first is the rise of China and India in the traditional IR terms of military and economic power. ...The second is the expanding nature of what IR scholarship needs to address, as global integration transforms the nature of the issues to be addressed and numerous trends expand the number and types of relevant actors. Neither theory nor practice is yet coping well with the profound implications of these fundamental changes. Investigating what kind of a world order might emerge from these two simultaneous tsunamis will require an enormous research agenda that explores the roles of ideas, structural factors, and path dependencies across regions and issue areas. This article aims to illuminate a subset focused around the connection between theory and practice as related to two emerging powers. It briefly maps developments in Western IR theory and explores how those connect—or fail to connect—with intellectual and policy currents in the rising Asian giants. It draws on a number of interviews and workshops held in Asia in the past two years that explore how Asian scholars and policymakers are dealing with, and perhaps beginning to shape, the rapidly changing conceptual landscape.
Transparency-based global environmental governance, like all global governance, necessarily plays out in national contexts. Its efficacy is shaped not only by global politics but also by the norms ...and capacities prevailing within countries. Over the past two decades, there has been an extraordinary upheaval in transparency views and practices in numerous countries, rich and poor, democratic and authoritarian. This multi-faceted development has been driven by such varied factors as democratization, privatization, and changing views about appropriate regulatory practices. These changes provide the crucial context for understanding the transparency transformation that is currently unfolding within global environmental governance, as well as what its promise, limitations and implications in practice might be in diverse national contexts.
This article puts forward a theoretical explanation for why norms of international behavior change over time. It argues that the mainstream neorealist and neoliberal arguments on the static nature of ...state interests are implausible, as the recent empirical work of the growing constructivist school has convincingly shown. But the constructivists have not yet provided a theoretical basis for understanding why one norm rather than another becomes institutionalized, nor has learning theory yet provided an adequate explanation. An evolutionary approach that draws its hypotheses from an analogy to population genetics offers a promising alternative. This article briefly outlines the constructivist critique of neorealism and neoliberalism. It develops the evolutionary analogy, illustrating the model with a case study on the emergence of a norm of transparency in international security and briefly discussing how the model might apply in several other issue areas.
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