ABSTRACT
NO: The Chinese experience is difficult to replicate by other countries
China has made remarkable progress in environmental management and is ambitious in promoting a low carbon economy and an ‘ecological civilisation’. However, the ‘Chinese model’ of environmental governance is hard to generalise to the global community. First, China’s environmental governance is far from a role model and the country is still facing serious pollution threats. Second, the basis of China’s environmental governance is its top-down, autocratic and bureaucratic system, which is distinct to Chinese culture and costly for other countries to emulate. And last, a global solution for fighting climate change depends more on the bottom-up interaction of multiple stakeholders at multiple levels, which is quite different from China’s national practice of top-down governance. In a nutshell, there is no panacea for effective global climate governance. Every country ought to search for suitable solutions to climate change congruent with their local physical and sociopolitical conditions.
