Scrutinizing environmental governance in a digital age: New ways of seeing, participating, and intervening

Chinese cities as digital environmental governance innovators: Evidence from subnational low-Carbon plans

“…Whether local government actors will have the agency and authority to act on new data generated is a major uncertainty, where our third transformation pathway suggests digital technologies will open new opportunities and agency for new actors and non-state entities. As Kloppenburg et al (2022) note, a core promise of digital environmental governance is that it “opens up new possibilities for participation in governance practices and processes across all these levels.” But major uncertainties exist, particularly in the Chinese context where public participation in environmental governance is limited and is coordinated from the top-down (Munro, 2021). For example, whether citizens will have access to data generated by digital technologies that can allow them to make more sustainable or environmentally-friendly decisions via “citizen sensing” (Fritz et al, 2019; Hsu et al, 2014; Kloppenburg et al, 2022) is an open question.…”

“…As Kloppenburg et al (2022) note, a core promise of digital environmental governance is that it “opens up new possibilities for participation in governance practices and processes across all these levels.” But major uncertainties exist, particularly in the Chinese context where public participation in environmental governance is limited and is coordinated from the top-down (Munro, 2021). For example, whether citizens will have access to data generated by digital technologies that can allow them to make more sustainable or environmentally-friendly decisions via “citizen sensing” (Fritz et al, 2019; Hsu et al, 2014; Kloppenburg et al, 2022) is an open question. For instance, Goldstein and Faxon (2022) note that in Myanmar, an autocratic country that has “gone from an informational black hole to a node in global networks” amidst a “messy and incomplete” democratic transition, “withholding information has long been a source of state power,” and that digital technologies’ adoption in the absence of governance reforms has not automatically resulted in significant shifts in power or democratization, since the state still seeks to maintain data and information flows generated through digitalization.…”

“…The notion of digital environmental governance has recently emerged with the advent of large-scale data or big data, earth observation (EO) technology, the proliferation of information communication technologies (ICT), sensors or other real-time monitoring devices (Hsu et al, 2020a), or what Bakker and Ritts (2018) term “Smart Earth” technologies. As scholars have observed, however, how digital technologies transform environmental governance and its implications are understudied and under-conceptualized (Große-Bley and Kostka, 2021; Kloppenburg et al, 2022). We aim to investigate the context in which digital environmental governance approaches are currently considered in China at the subnational level.…”

“…Automated decision-making systems are not a future idea, but are an immediate reality, as governments are implementing digital devices equipped with automated processes to seamlessly manage through the execution of smart contracts or other interventions. For instance, Kloppenburg et al (2022) note the example of an automated congestion tax on diesel cars in Stockholm that are identified by wireless radio-frequency identification technology. Other examples include the use of blockchain technology to enable peer to peer trading of energy in microgrid networks (Vieira and Zhang, 2021) that fully obviate the need for human intermediaries.…”

Impact of Public Environmental Concerns on the Digital Transformation of Heavily Polluting Enterprises

“…With the rapid development of emerging information technologies such as artificial intelligence, big data and blockchain, digital technology has become a powerful driving force for high-quality economic development, playing a key role in enterprise development [9,10]. As the main micro body of the high-quality development of the national economy, digital transformation is the only way for enterprises to comply with the law of the development of the times [11].…”