China’s certified emission reductions (CCERs) are generated under the China GHG Voluntary Emission Reduction Programme. In 2020, this programme was approved by the technical advisory board of the Carbon Offset and Reduction Scheme for International Aviation (CORSIA) set up under the International Civil Aviation Organisation (ICAO), making CCERs an eligible reduction unit to be used for compensating emissions stemming from the aviation sector. While such an achievement represents a cornerstone in China’s strategy on internationalizing CCERs, there remains significant practical and quality-related issues which prevent CCERs from playing a more significant role in the international carbon market. To identify these issues and understand their relative importance, we employed a Delphi approach to elicit consensus views from 17 experienced CCER practitioners on potential issues and adjustments needed for the improvement of international recognition, acceptance, and the use of CCERs. We identified defects in eight key areas: social and environmental risk management; reversal of emissions reductions; pricing mechanisms; verification systems; evaluation systems for sustainable development contributions; transaction channels for international actors; CCER methodologies; and legal and asset attributes. Based on these findings, the authors make policy recommendations for improving the China GHG Voluntary Emission Reduction Programme.

There has been increasing interest in whether low carbon cities developed under Chinese institutional arrangements can facilitate a transformative change. Unlike their western counterparts, Chinese low carbon cities are mainly developed through a top-down approach characterized by strong regulatory influences and centrally-led pilots. Inspired by insights from institutional theory, this paper assessed the progress that has been made in Chinese low carbon cities through understanding urban actors’ willingness and capacity to pursue more radical changes. Based on semi-structured interviews and documentary analysis, it is found that due to the low recognition of the intrinsic value of carbon reduction, low carbon transition was largely represented as a practical discussion around national binding targets and local economic development. Following this, it is suggested that any attempt to speed up urban low carbon transition should consider strengthening incentive structures for cultural or paradigm change.

The working mechanism of Chinese central environmental inspection (CEI) has been evolving. Through integrating insights from the notions of institutional pillars, institutional work and the level of institutionalisation, this study constructs a framework that is suited to unravel the working mechanisms of the new CEI and to assess its potential in transforming local environmental governance regime. Through two sets of empirical evidence, we found that CEI has employed six types of institutional work to change both formal and informal institutions regarding environmental protection at local level, and has led to an increased in local governments’ political attention on environmental planning. The findings from this study make important supplement to current research on CEI, which have been dominated by evaluating CEI’s impact on curbing end-of-pipe pollutants through econometric models. Based on our findings, it is suggested that successive CEIs are required in the near future to further deepening the level of institutionalisation of environmental protection and prevent the situation regressing.

In recent years, industrial metropolises in China have experienced a surge in proactive planning initiatives aimed at developing high-rise industrial structures, commonly known as “Industry’s Going Upstairs (IGU).” This study argues that the IGU represents a distinct form of urban verticality that is neither motivated by capitalist speculation nor sustainability prompts but rather by local states’ intervention to ensure economic resilience and enhance innovation capabilities. This study presents the case of Shenzhen to demonstrate how the adoption of the IGU initiative is catalyzed by concerns over manufacturing sectors’ out-migration and the effects of volatile US-China relations on the city’s competitiveness. In light of these circumstances, Shenzhen has embraced the ambitious IGU initiative as a practical approach to reverse the trend of deindustrialization while sidestepping the lengthy process of industrial land redevelopment. The paper concludes by emphasizing the need for a comprehensive understanding of political-economic factors that drive urban vertical expansion and their potential consequences.

Although growing attention has been paid to the role of cities as agents for driving transformative low carbon transition, empirical work in this field suggests that urban carbon reduction responses vary significantly. In order to shed light on why cities perform differently and why radical changes rarely take place at the city level, this study builds on the multilevel governance framework and draws attention to interaction effects between the three well-recognised governance processes: central-local interaction, transnational networks, and local networks. It is argued that understanding the interaction effects can not only help us better apprehend the longitudinal process by which low carbon actions were materialised in cities, but also contributes to identifying pathways by which urban carbon reduction responses were invoked in different socio-political contexts. Empirically, the interaction effects were explored through an in-depth case study of a Chinese low carbon forerunner city Guangzhou. Material for the case study comes from 32 semi-structured interviews with key actors from both government and non-governmental sectors carried out in 2017. Three mechanisms were outlined to illustrate the linear relationships between different governance processes which turned Guangzhou into a low carbon forerunner. Furthermore, based on the positive reading of the findings, a self-reinforced framework which is able to facilitate continuous progress and more radical changes was developed. This self-reinforced framework not only serves a normative purpose to guide future interventions on urban low carbon transition, but also provides insights into why transformative changes rarely emerge bottom-up by showing how difficult it is to sustain its function over time.