Abstract
Most Asian countries are experiencing escalating air pollution and other environmental challenges. Many political measures, such as regulations and promotional subsidies, have not proved effective or efficient due to a lack of governance. The reason for this may come from the historical and cultural background of government-led economies. Due to the top-down approach to sustainable development, most private sector companies, as well as the general population, do not participate voluntarily in meeting these new challenges. In order for these Asian countries to become leaders in the new global trend towards green growth, this paper examines the Asian values of guānxì to facilitate the interrelationship between public and private sectors, and proposes an Asian public–private partnership model with five structural principles, three functional propositions, and seven procedural factors. Using these governance elements, Asian governments should create, maintain, and utilize the progression of guānxì from acquaintance via trust to loyalty. Through this stepwise approach, Asian governments could construct an innovative virtuous circle to create value based on network management, which is the ultimate paradigm of sustainable development.
Highlights
We proposed the Asian value system of guanxì as a core factor for sustainable development, because it is a new paradigm, involving not just the maximization of a single economic agent’s profits and/or efficiency, but embracing a harmonized way to create values based on collaborative networks
Collaborative networking of green growth policies is so important in the modern interdependent society that we should ensure that sustainable performance falls within this networking, especially in establishing the complex procedures of sustainable development or green growth
Sustainable development is not optional, but is the survival kit for humankind, and collaboration for sustainable development is essential for our future
Summary
The United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) is an international environmental treaty that was adopted on 9 May 1992 in order to overcome global climate change and the resultant global warming. This flexible mechanism worked well, at least during the first stage of the Kyoto Protocol over the years 2008 through 2012 While this mechanism forms a major cornerstone toward sustainable development or green growth, it has inherent limits in expanding its mechanism, due to the top-down approach to reducing GHG emissions adopted by the selected group of governments in Annex I. Many governments and their regulated leading companies made complaints about advantage being taken of this top-down type of sacrifice by free riders, which placed costly new burdens on the participating parties. In order to decrease CO2 by 1 Gt, all the cars in the EU would have to cease driving completely for one year, which makes the situation almost unimaginable when we include an additional reduction target of 56 Gt to compensate for the withdrawal of the United States
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