Toward just energy transitions in authoritarian regimes: indirect participation and adaptive governance

Abstract

Low-carbon energy transition is a response to the dual challenges of climate change and sustainable development. Recent years have seen the emergence of the discourse of just energy transitions, which position social justice at the centre of energy transitions. Authoritarian regimes, because of the established tradition of command-and-control policy making, are considered as the main battlefield for advancing a just transition globally. A case review of low-carbon energy transitions worldwide reveals an important and significant knowledge gap on justice issues in more authoritarian regimes. Two in-depth case studies in China show that, although social injustice seems to be inevitable for energy transitions in authoritarian regimes, adaptive transition governance mainly through indirect participation mechanisms offers a pathway toward juster energy transitions. The study calls for more nuanced and longer-term perspectives of social injustice that emerge in the process of energy transitions in authoritarian regimes.

How Does Differential Public Participation Influence Outcome Justice in Energy Transitions? Evidence from a Waste-to-Energy (WTE) Project in China

“…Despite the reforms in environmental governance, authoritarian countries still largely follow the established tradition of command-and-control governance modalities [32,33]. This raises concerns that these countries are more likely to embrace unjust energy transitions [34].…”

Who’s fighting for justice?: advocacy in energy justice and just transition scholarship

“…Community resistance to renewables, primarily wind, solar, and hydropower were also prominent, particularly in developing countries (70.5% of cases) (Yenneti and Day 2015, Martínez and Castillo 2016, Yenneti et al 2016, Klain et al 2017, Rasch et al 2017, Avila 2018, Delina and Sovacool 2018, Aunphattanasilp 2019, Jayapalan and Ganesh 2019, Kluskens et al 2019, Sayan 2019, Schapper and Urban 2019, Inderberg et al 2020, Martinez 2020. One article highlighted opposition to geothermal power generation (Cuppen et al 2020) and three articles examined contexts in which there was opposition to renewable technologies due to deployment that resulted in energy affordability issues (Andreas et al 2018, Monyei et al 2018, Huang andLiu 2020). In many cases, notably in six of the seven articles that examined hydropower projects, opposition to renewable deployment came from Table 3.…”

When government-led experimentation meets social resistance? A case study of solar policy retreat in Shenzhen, China

“…Contrary to this trend, in China, the instrumentalist and functionalist approaches still prevail in transition governance [52,53]. This is partly a result of China's political system, where environmental governance largely follows the paradigm of authoritarianism with limited transparency in policymaking and a general lack of public participation [54]. In urban low-carbon experimentation, local governments are often supposed to take a leading role, and the focus of transition governance is placed on the choice of various policy instruments to mobilize key resources.…”