Abstract
This study uses concepts of power and 'scaled politics' to analyze the effects of environmentalization and technocratic and market-based measures in China. Political scientists have explored the politics behind the proactive engagement of the Chinese state in governing the environment since the 2000s, also drawing on political ecology. Based on policy document analysis and ethnographic fieldwork, the study investigates a case of ecological resettlement in Inner Mongolia by examining how this became a new solution to desertification and rangeland degradation. The article shows how resettlement was implemented through multi-scalar practices and the reconfiguration of spatial relations, and why pastoral households responded to resettlement in certain ways. The state turned certain areas and people (associated with overgrazing) into subjects of governance. By distinguishing the different strategies used by central and local government, the analysis shows that disciplinary and neoliberal environmentality are associated with scalar practices between the state and the people, and within the state system. Neoliberal environmentality, however, counteracts the making of environmental subjects and encounters resistance. Sovereign environmentality is still deployed as a means to control local government and the obedience of herders. Pastoralists resist this, depending on their different subjectivities. The study advances our understanding of the multiple governmentality perspective, its analytics, and scalar processes.
Highlights
Political ecology scholarship occupies a small share of the rapidly growing literature on environmental governance in China (Yeh 2015)
This study focuses on exploring ecological resettlement subordinated to one large-scale national environmental program, the Beijing-Tianjin Sandstorm Source Control Program, in a pastoral area of Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region (Inner Mongolia), China
This process of problem construction is similar to what Walsh (2012) found in Tanzania, where actors behind-the-scenes fostered environmental panic about water shortage around the Mtera hydro-power dam which led to the eviction of pastoralists who were accused of overgrazing their herds
Summary
Political ecology scholarship occupies a small share of the rapidly growing literature on environmental governance in China (Yeh 2015). Goals and priorities existing at different scales within the state, and the tensions between different levels and sectors of the governance system – exacerbated by decentralization – have been framed by concepts such as fragmented authoritarianism (Ran 2013) and authoritarian environmentalism (Eaton and Kostka 2014). These emphasize the hierarchical, structural and authoritarian nature of state power in China. Currently articulated under the umbrella of "ecological modernization", there is a tendency among academics to accept the Chinese state's approach to managing the environment as a positive shift towards environmental sustainability, without accounting for the risks that result when environmental issues are rendered technical and manageable (Mol and Carter 2006)
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