With apologies for cross postings
Final Call for Papers
Reconfiguring China’s environmental governance in a relational, multi-scalar context
Association of American Geographers Annual Meeting, Chicago
April 21-25, 2015
Organizers: I-Chun Catherine Chang (University of Minnesota, US), David Gibbs (University of Hull, UK), and Zhen Yu (University of Hull, UK)
Over the last decade, China’s quest for sustainable development has spawned sweeping changes in environmental governance at different scales. The national government embarked on institutional reforms to promote a low-carbon economy by setting up a carbon trade scheme and reinventing environmental protection agencies. Various urban initiatives to make Chinese cities more eco-friendly and sustainable have also been enacted. Internationally, China has been actively signing bilateral agreements with other nations and the European Union on issues such as clean energy and climate change, and also involving itself deep in international environmental policy making, in particular the upcoming final 2015 UN Climate Change Conference in Paris that will result in a new agreement to replace the Kyoto Protocol.
All of these actions suggest a multi-scalar restructuring in how the Chinese state governs environmental issues. Nevertheless, current research on this sustainable transition mostly limits the scope to a specific initiative at a single scale, and therefore overlooks potentially valuable inter-scalar dynamics in experimentation for sustainability. How various environmental initiatives at different scales relationally articulate with the state’s environmental restructuring project is also unclear, both theoretically and empirically. Particularly hard to find are works on the influence of China’s environmental transition project over international institutions, discourses, and polices, or studies concerning how individuals and households relate to changes at higher scales.
In this paper session, we would like to invite papers that investigate China’s environmental governance restructuring through a relational, multi-scalar perspective. We welcome research that explores the dynamic relations across different scales and locales to offer us new understanding on China’s sustainability transition. Topics may include, but are not limited to:
1. China’s environmental governance restructuring process that involves institutional, power, or social reconfiguration across different scales;
2. The mobility of China’s sustainable transition beyond its national borders, or across multiple geographical locations;
3. The multi-scalar implications of China’s sustainable transition, especially work that concerns households and individuals.
Interested participants are invited to submit their paper title, abstract (no more than 250 words) and Presenter Identification Number (PIN) to session organizers at I-Chun Catherine Chang ([log in to unmask]), David Gibbs ([log in to unmask]) and Zhen Yu ([log in to unmask]) by October 24th. Authors need to submit paper abstract first through the AAG website to obtain the PIN. Guidelines for preparing abstracts are available at: http://www.aag.org/cs/http://www.aag.org/cs/annualmeeting/how_to_submit_an_abstract
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