Abstract
China faces a number of impressive challenges in dealing with climate change: rising energy use, growing emission levels of greenhouse gases, dangerous levels of air pollution over cities and low resilience against flood and drought. Sustainable urbanization has been adopted as a keyword in handling these challenges. The Chinese central government has undertaken a variety of measures, including the launch of large Sino-European programs to learn from ‘developed nations’. In the wake of these partnerships, a great variety of cross-national and cross-city agreements were signed. Sino-European cooperation does not often run as smoothly as initially hoped because of diverging interests, cultural misunderstandings and practical limitations. In the background, a mismatch in normative conceptions Chinese and European participants have of ‘good governance’ plays a role. In this contribution, insights taken from Montesquieu’s ‘The Spirit of Laws’ regarding checks and balances and trias politica (updated to ‘sextas politica’ for the 21st century) are used to comprehend how the exertion of power is distributed and expected to be distributed differently in Chinese than in European administrative traditions. The article will end with conclusions on how European misconceptions of Chinese governance complicate Sino-European collaboration in sustainable urbanization policies.
Highlights
China is facing a number of impressive challenges in dealing with climate change in the built environment at the same time: its energy use is rising due to the emergence of modern middle class style consumption patterns, it is emitting a growing amount of greenhouse gases, most metropolitan areas suffer from dangerously high levels of air pollution affecting the health of hundreds of millions of people and its resilience against floods in coastal and water-rich areas and against drought in many parts of North China is low
In many cases, underlying these misunderstandings in decent and professional project management for sustainable urbanization is a visceral legal and political conception of ‘good governance’ that European policy-makers and analysts have adopted at home and unconsciously take with them when going to China to do international projects there
We argue that most EU participants in joint Sino-European projects promoting sustainable urbanization in China unconsciously judge the country following Montesquieuan standards
Summary
China is facing a number of impressive challenges in dealing with climate change in the built environment at the same time: its energy use is rising due to the emergence of modern middle class style consumption patterns, it is emitting a growing amount of greenhouse gases, most metropolitan areas suffer from dangerously high levels of air pollution affecting the health of hundreds of millions of people and its resilience against floods in coastal and water-rich areas and against drought in many parts of North China is low. The goal is to encourage local governments to commit themselves to become the national standard in balanced social, economic and environmental urban growth and to use the successful ones among them as demonstration models to be mainstreamed around the country [3,5,6] Most of these cities have committed themselves to drafting sophisticated indicator systems to monitor their progress, revise urban master plans to make their new towns and science parks greener, adopt clean and green technologies and seek international partner countries, provinces and cities to support them in building up their capacity and knowledge base [5,7,8,9].
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