Association for Public Policy Analysis & Management

A large literature has examined city’s role in addressing global commons issues such as climate change, with growing attention to how local climate action is embedded in and affected by multi-level governance forces (Homsy & Warner, 2015; Homsy, Liu, & Warner, 2019; Krause, 2011). However, most empirical evidence comes from Western Europe and North America, which are primarily post-industrialized, democratic countries. Relatively little is known about local climate actions adopted by cities in China, which not only is the world’s biggest greenhouse gas emitter but also face severe environmental problems in multiple fronts on its own. The scholarship of China’s environmental policy has recognized the proliferation of local policy innovation and experimentation in sustainability (Lo, 2014; Miao & Lang, 2015). These studies typically focus on the central-local dynamics underlying local sustainability actions (Ran, 2013; Kostka, 2016), without fully accounting for a more complex multi-level governance framework that includes both horizontal learning across localities and the roles of global policy regimes and international organizations.

In this paper, we examine local climate actions of Chinese cities from a multi-level governance perspective in a case study of the low-carbon city pilot program (LCCP), a nationwide experimental program initiated by the central government in 2010 (Khanna, et al., 2014). We employ a mixed-method approach to reveal whether and how local climate actions are shaped by international cooperation and horizontal learning. First, we collected the action plans of 51 low-carbon pilot cities through a combination of online search engine and government information disclosure request. We conducted systematic content analysis to assess the breadth and feasibility of climate actions adopted in these plans. Second, we employed statistical analysis and qualitative comparative analysis (QCA) to test the extent to which previous experiences of international collaboration and inter-city collaboration may facilitate more comprehensive, balanced, and feasible action plans, controlling for effects of national priorities as well as local conditions. Third, in a comparative analysis of extreme cases, we plan to conduct field research and archival research to further illustrate the framing and learning mechanisms in which international and domestic collaboration enable less-developed regions to overcome local capacity constraint and interest group influence while identifying local co-benefits of global climate mitigation.

Our research offers an empirical assessment of local climate actions by Chinese cities, and contributes to the international literature on the dynamics of multi-level governance in local climate policy innovation from a developing country context.