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Shiuh-Shen Chien

2014-10-30
18:00:00 - 20:00:00

308 , Mathematics Research Center Building (ori. New Math. Bldg.)

This paper aims to critically review a recently developed phenomenon that Chinese local governments, which used to play a role in post-Mao economic transition, have nowadays competed among each other to make environmental policy initiatives. I argue that Chinese local policy initiatives are mainly triggered by its party-state cadre selection mechanism on a basis of performance-based personnel management system, whose evaluation features include upward accountability, territorial competition and self-interests with temporal (short-sighted) and spatial (restricted boundary) concerns. Such party-state mechanism effective to promotion of local economic development is not that workable toward environmental protections because the system is unable to (1) fix with inconsistent priority between environmental protection and economic development, (2) to make better trans-boundary and cross-generation calculation for environment; and (3) to present appropriate emergency responses for uncertain damages created by time unpredictability of environment.