How do experts engage in China’s local climate governance? A case study of Guangdong Province

Abstract

Taking Guangdong Province as a case study, this paper examines the ways in which experts engage in China’s local climate governance. The paper first explains that most prominent experts in Guangdong’s climate governance are those who work in semiofficial institutions or universities. The paper then illuminates the policy work of Guangdong experts by scrutinizing their engagement with three national policy pilot programmes promulgated by China’s National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC): the low-carbon provincial pilot programme, the emissions inventory, and the emissions trading scheme. Lastly, in order to contextualize the knowledge–policy interface in the Chinese authoritarian context, the paper adopts the notion of the ‘politics of knowledge’ to explain how the political environment and local authorities’ considerations influence the conduct of experts in China’s local climate governance. While the previous literature mainly focuses on the role of experts in policy formulation, this study extends the understanding of the role of experts in climate governance by detailing the contribution of Guangdong experts to practically all of the stages of the policy process, including the capacity building, policy formulation, implementation, and evaluation phases of the policy cycle.