China has indicated its ever-greater commitment to environmental sustainability and biodiversity under the rubric of “ecological civilisation”. But what this means in practice is unclear. Given its historic weakness in actual environmental policy implementation, China is currently engaged in a significant overhaul of its domestic structures for environmental governance.
This ongoing reform in environmental governance draws from a very old policy repertoire that prioritises:
1) centralisation of control
2) simplifying and standardising bureaucratic categories
3) propaganda/publicity to move hearts to support policies for biodiversity
This seminar focuses on the “performance” of biodiversity preservation in three ways. First is the linkage between governance reform and biodiversity preservation through the increasing practice of ecological redlining (to designate certain areas as completely off limits for the preservation of biodiversity).
Second and third are more phenomena to consider in the near future: China’s hosting of and participation in COP15 (The UN Convention for Biodiversity) in Kunming, and the ways in which Chinese officials “perform” these commitments to biodiversity for wider international audiences, particularly those in Belt and Road (BRI) countries, who in turn can be expected to engage variously in co-constitutive-performances of acquiescence or counter-performances of critique or resistance.
Speaker
- Julia C. Strauss, Professor of Chinese Politics at SOAS, University of London, where she served as Editor of The China Quarterly from 2002-2011. She works on 20th century state building and institution building in China and Taiwan, with her monograph State Formation in China and Taiwan: Bureaucracy, Campaign and Performance (Cambridge 2020).
Chair
- Melissa Leach, IDS Director
Discussants
- Ian Scoones, IDS Research Fellow
- Mick Moore, IDS Research Fellow
- Jing Gu, IDS Research Fellow
- Wei Shen, IDS Research Fellow
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