Water and land: Environmental governance and Chinese eco-development

Abstract

Eco-city development has emerged as a key urban form. As one of the active advocates as well as a vigorous promoter of eco-developments, China has initiated and implemented a vast number of ecoprojects in a variety of geographical locations and with diverse scales. Despite claims to integrate economic with social and environmental objectives, research on eco-city practices suggest that mainstream eco-developments promote, first and foremost, economic growth, and largely ignore issues such as environmental well-being and social equity. There is a pressing need to better understand why the environment is being so marginalized in so-called eco-developments and what the implications of that might be for environmental quality. To investigate these issues, we adopt a political ecology perspective as this enables us to focus on local insights into resource use and access to resources. By doing so we can point to ways in which resource efficiency fluctuates over time. We select Chongming Island as our case study because of its central role in eco-development in China. Indeed, the Island is of global significance and gained global repute because it was the proposed site of the world's first dedicated eco-city. We draw upon detailed fieldwork, including reports, planning documents, key person interviews and discussions with residents to analyse how local people perceive proposals for eco-development on their Island and how ongoing state management of the Island may have unintended adverse consequences for environmental quality, especially for water and land.

Mapping the Research Landscape of Nature-Based Solutions in Urbanism

“…Examples of green roofs and urban green parks reduce urban heat stress; vegetation and rain gardens intercept stormwater; city lagoons and wetlands store permeable surface water. Under the framework of NBS, some actions in cities were researched, such as the preservation of soil [14], and watersheds [15][16][17], the protection of biodiversity [18,19], the improvement of air quality [20,21], the reduction of greenhouse gas [22], and the reclamation of land for increasing green space [23,24]. NBS are intended to make cities locally adapted, resourceefficient, and systemic intervened by bringing more natural features and processes.…”

Urban Entrepreneurialism and Sustainable Development: A Comparative Analysis of Chinese Eco-Developments

“…It can be seen that the under the guise of an ecological development campaign, in which the physical greening of the Islands is a visible manifestation of eco-activity, the production of green land for the wider municipality may well be at the expense of the locality's economy, ecology and social culture (Xie et al, 2019a;2019b). With no industrial development to replace the demolished TVEs, Chongming has been relying heavily on transfer payments from Shanghai Municipal Government to maintain its fiscal balance and governmental operation, with such transfers accounting for 60% of Chongming's governmental income in 2014 (Chongming Finance, 2015).…”

Disappearing reeds on Chongming Island: An environmental microhistory of Chinese eco-development

“…As a result, the impact of these ecological initiatives on local environments and communities, and in particular how local people perceive the changes brought about by eco-developments, remains largely understudied (exceptions can be seen in Xie et al, 2019aXie et al, , 2019bChang, 2019). This paper contributes to this body of research arguing that an environmental microhistory approach offers a fruitful perspective for understanding eco-development projects in China.…”

“…Song, 2016). These eco-projects, involving either minor retrofits or the large-scale development of new towns and cities, aim to achieve a win-win outcome for both development and the environment (Shao, 2015;Xie et al, 2019a).…”