Policy making

This chapter focuses on environmental policy making for achieving sulfur dioxide (SO₂) mitigation goals in the Five-Year Plans. China’s policy supply is understood under two governance models: being rule-based, as in those countries with a well-established rule of law, and goal-centered, as in China’s handling of SO₂ mitigation and environmental protection. China faces immense policy-making challenges, but many demanding requirements are much relaxed under goal-centered governance. Various conditions enable China to follow the latter governance model. Goals are positioned as the top priority while policies are only secondary. Policies are actively made in a decentralized manner, and they evolve through implementation selection. Then this chapter continues to examine influential economic, energy and environmental factors that determine SO₂ emissions. The rise and fall of China’s SO₂ emissions in past Five-Year Plans are decomposed to understand the contributions of these factors. SO₂ removal in coal-fired power plants is analyzed in greater depth from the perspectives of effluent SO₂ concentration, standards and SO₂ scrubbers.