The policy development and implementation process

國

立 政 治 大 學

‧

N a tio na

l C h engchi U ni ve rs it y

4.2.1. The policy development and implementation process

Ding²⁹⁴ proposes three approaches to explain policy implementation problems in China. The „factional approach‟ focuses on the top of Chinese politics. It argues that a defining characteristic of the system as a whole is its fragmentation and disjointedness.

Policy development mainly depends on the outcome of factional quarrels. The provincialism approach suggests that the central government has vision of future development in competition with the provinces‟ own vision. The third, „national integration approach,‟ sees China‟s centralization as a means to strengthen national unity.

In cases where the central government considers a policy not as a major objective, the policy is locally often not correctly implemented.²⁹⁵ The problems are acute when it comes to coal fired power plants and their environmental impact. In terms of environmental protection, legislation is considered as sufficient but its implementation as inadequate, a fact that is reflected in the large number of violations of environmental laws and weak law enforcement.²⁹⁶ The shortcomings of governmental institutions are increasingly remedied by citizens actions that play a “crucial role in improving pollution regulation and controlling severe pollution.”²⁹⁷

294 Xiaojiong Ding, "Policy Implementation in Contemporary China: the making of converted schools,"

Journal of Contemporary China, Vol. 19, No. 64 (2010).

295 Ibid., 360.

296 Benjamin van Rooij, "The People vs. Pollution: understanding citizen action against pollution in China," ibid.No. 63, 55.

297 Ibid., 57.

‧

Struggle in energy policy development; economic preferences still dominates According to Steinfeld,²⁹⁸ China‟s energy policy is like those of other large consuming countries: confused and uncoordinated. Nevertheless, the energy policy is no exception in its institutional reform efforts. Most significant are the central administration reorganizations in 1998, which focused on improving efficiency and strengthening the government‟s regulatory role by relinquishing it from business operations.²⁹⁹ For the coal-based electricity industry, one of the most significant changes in recent years has been the coal price liberalization, which had two effects:

the government reduced its subsidies to the coal sector and the management of producing plants began to implement more energy efficient methods.³⁰⁰ The success of the reforms is reflected the industry‟s profitability. From 1980 to 2000, the coal industry faced financial losses of up to 6 billion Yuan (1991) annually. The turnaround happened in 2003, with a gain of 14 billion, which rose to 56 billion Yuan in 2005.³⁰¹ Since the reforms were launched, most power plants belong officially to one of five major state-owned national energy corporations, which are enterprise groups that answer to the central government, at least in theory.³⁰² In practice, however, most of decisions are made locally. The reforms in the electricity sector have had similar. After State Power of China was broken up into several regional companies,³⁰³ it became a profitable business.

The future of China‟s energy policy will involve meeting several challenges. “Coal, for example, appears inexpensive in the near term for China. But if coal is burned without environmental cleanup mechanisms, flue gas desulfurization systems, and related technologies, it imposes a costly public health toll.”³⁰⁴ Policy development has to find answers to this problem. However, energy policy cannot be viewed in isolation.

Steinfeld notes that energy policy is greatly influenced by national industrial policy and macroeconomic growth policy; even non-economic policies like environmental regulatory policy and health care policy are more or less strongly related to energy

298 Steinfeld, "Energy Policy", 144.

299 Wu, "Deregulation and growth in China's energy sector: a review of recent development," 1417.

300 Ibid., 1419.

301 Bing Wang, "An imbalanced development of coal and electricity industries in China," ibid.Vol. 35, No. 10 (2007), 4964.

302 Lester and Steinfeld, "China's Real Energy Crisis," 36.

303 Woo, "China's Electric Power Market: The Rise and Fall of IPPs", 2(

304 Steinfeld, "Energy Policy", 134.

‧

國

立 政 治 大 學

‧

N a tio na

l C h engchi U ni ve rs it y

policy and finally to the underlying economic policy.³⁰⁵ To be successful, energy proposals have to overcome several hurdles: “(1) associated benefits of the proposed decision for other policy problems; (2) presence of a consistent „issue champion‟; (3) strength of mobilized and united „veto players‟, i.e. those political actors who have the ability to decline a choice being made; (4) vertical and horizontal support; and (5) clear policy preferences of the leadership.”³⁰⁶ A further important aspect of energy policy is that it significantly affects decisions in the domain of economic growth and is often in conflict with local circumstances.³⁰⁷ All these aspects have a strongly negative influence on governance issues in the coal industry where overlapping interests exist.

That is particularly the case for energy decisions. Kong ³⁰⁸ speaks of a „leadership vacuum‟ in China‟s energy policy where “decisions are driven by projects promoted by localities or industries rather than being guided by a coherent national energy policy.”

A wide range of actors and institutions are involved in China‟s energy policymaking and implementation process. Policy development is not limited to the central government or to the party; the process is complex and the involved parties are characterized more by an “obscurity that revolves around the modes of interaction amongst them³⁰⁹” than by a transparent arrangement. The result is a consensual form of decision making for formulating energy policies which results in a lengthy process

“to gain support of all the related ministries” and has an undesirable result of

“regulations that are often outdated by the time of their final approval.”³¹⁰ The struggles in the process of policy development have a direct impact on the process of policy implementation.

Possibly the most important characterization of the energy policy development is that since the economic reforms were first launched, China‟s energy sector has largely

305 Ibid., 145.

306 Bo Kong, "China's Energy Decision-Making: becoming more like the United States?," Journal of Contemporary China, Vol. 18, No. 62 (2009), 790.

307 Ibid., 790.

308 Ibid.

309 Michal Meidan, Philip Andrews-Speed and Ma Xin, "Shaping China's Energy Policy: actors and processes," ibid.No. 61, 595.

310 Ibid., 592.

‧

國

立 政 治 大 學

‧

N a tio na

l C h engchi U ni ve rs it y

been driven by wider economic concerns, priorities and policies.³¹¹ The political and ideological vision may in recent years have undergone a change. Some authors have observed a deemphasis of economic priorities in favor of “social equity and a more balanced growth pattern, as manifested by slogans such as „the Moderately Well-off Society‟, the „Harmonious Society‟ and „Scientific Development‟.”³¹²

Struggle in energy policy implementation

Coal fired power plants require a long chain of national and provincial policy implementation. The example of licensing coal mines demonstrates the different layers of agencies involved in the process. Each of them has a critical position not only as veto power for approval. Their importance can be seen even more in the implementation of China‟s main objective of energy policy: “supply security, economic efficiency, social equity, environmental protection.”³¹³

Table 24: Coal mine licensing procedures³¹⁴

311 Ibid., 606.

312 Ibid., 594.

313 Ibid., 594.

314 International Energy Agency, "Cleaner Coal in China", 63.

‧

capacity. The reforms introduced five super-ministries. One of them is the Ministry of Environment, which replaced the State Environmental Protection Agency.³¹⁵ Early research on these reforms indicates that energy policy implementation has not yet improved. It has been suggested that the National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC) still has a dominant position in the implementation process, which prevents a more equal consideration of issues not directly related to economic interests. The NDRC has a very “powerful authority to record, verify, and approve a variety of investment projects. This allows the NDRC to dominate the right to review, approve, and finance grandiose infrastructure investment projects.”³¹⁶ In terms of energy policy, for example, one of the key powers of the NDRC is to approve coal mine licenses and new coal fired plants. Its approval is needed “because without a filing confirmation letter from the NDRC, projects could not be started.”³¹⁷

Lieberthal and Oksenberg‟s ³¹⁸ study of large energy projects in China analyzed the policy-making process and its implications for their implementation. They concluded that governance for national policies can be seen as a bargaining process in central-provincial relations where “individual bureaucratic units have the capacity to pursue strategies which reduce control by superiors.”³¹⁹ That makes it difficult for the central government to implement a common policy. Steinfeld³²⁰ has interpreted this conclusion, twenty years after Lieberthal and Oksenberg‟s study, as modularized power arrangements. His conclusion is that for a country like China with a highly varied geographic, demographic, and development landscape, modularized power arrangements may be a suitable model. The governance system produces some striking outcomes. On the national level, the attempt to impose a national tax on high-sulfur coal, which accounts for a vast amount of pollution, is one of the new impulses of the central-level. In the run-up to the Olympic Games in 2008, for example, Beijing established a coal-free zone. Regional programs were established for pollution-rights

315 Yukyung Yeo, "Remaking the Chinese State and the Nature of Economic Governance? The early appraisal of the 2008 „super-ministry‟ reform," Journal of Contemporary China, Vol. 18, No. 62 (2009), 731-732.

316 Ibid., 733.

317 Ibid., 736.

318 Kenneth Lieberthal and Michel Oksenberg, Policy Making in China: Leaders, Structures, and Processes Princeton University Press, 1988).

319 Ibid., 389.

320 Steinfeld, "Energy Policy", 145.

‧

trading programs and some municipalities shifted public buses to cleaner burning fuels.³²¹ Like the energy policy case, energy governance was not decided at a higher level and led to fragmented results. The shift of power to lower-level institutions mentioned above can be attributed in particular to the understaffing of central-level-organizations. The decision making power has shifted to an ad hoc basis and primarily to grassroots actors; unsurprisingly, these actors‟ incentives to follow the policies formulated by the center are weak. They do not follow a „big picture‟ but rather the needs of local governments, local fuel and power producers and local industrial concerns.³²² A good example is the discrepancy between allotted power generating capacity and the actual installed capacity. About one fourth of the 440 gigawatts of generating power capacity is derived from „illegal‟ power plants, “plants that never received construction approval by the responsible central government agency.”³²³ Besides the understaffing of central-agencies, local governments also face a conflict of goals. Their work is judged mainly in terms of economic growth. The actors involved in power governance systems have strong incentives to fulfill these expectations and create even greater pressure for more, and cheaper, electricity. In addition, energy projects are mainly financed through two channels. Loans from state banks and investments from municipal or provincial energy development corporations support the governance system to channel its decision making to a very quick construction approval, to “get the plants online as quickly as possible.”³²⁴

Besides the governance privilege actors on lower levels, the overall number of actors exercising “de facto decision-making power³²⁵” is large and hard to analyze properly.

For instance, Lo and Leung³²⁶ have observed that the Municipal People's Congress (MPC) and the Municipal People's Political Consultative Conference (MPPCC) together with the mass media have become important sources of policy input. In a case study of public participation in environmental issues in Guangzhou, the authors concluded that the opening of governance structures to non-state actors may be an effective way to support government policy.

321 Ibid., 145.

322 Lester and Steinfeld, "China's Real Energy Crisis," 35.

323 Ibid., 36.

324 Ibid., 36.

325 Ibid., 38.

326 Carlos Wing Hung Lo and Sai Wing Leung, "Environmental Agency and Public Opinion in Guangzhou: The Limits of a Popular Approach to Environmental Governance," The China Quarterly, No. 163 (2000), 703.

‧

國

立 政 治 大 學

‧

N a tio na

l C h engchi U ni ve rs it y

The enormous demand for electricity and the limits of accurate planning and construction of new power plants has led to another remarkable development. An opt-out from the governance process can be observed among corporations and major energy consumers. Instead of trying to participate in the process, they have taken self help steps by installing their own diesel-fired generators. It is virtually impossible to estimate how much petrol will be used this way to produce electricity. According to Lester and Steinfeld³²⁷ “Generator manufacturers estimate that ten percent of China‟s total electric power consumption is supplied by these „within-the-fence‟ units.” Once installed, the political instruments will fail to regulate these facilities.

To summarize, energy and related environmental policies are constrained by several factors, including: “the vague and contradictory nature of the relevant laws and regulations; the nature of economic incentives for local government officials to prioritize economic growth at the expense of energy efficiency and the environment;

the weakness of formal legal mechanisms; the close relationship between business and government; and the deep-rooted belief across society of the need for and desirability of economic advancement.”³²⁸

327 Lester and Steinfeld, "China's Real Energy Crisis," 37.

328 Meidan, Andrews-Speed and Xin, "Shaping China's Energy Policy: actors and processes," 615.

‧

國

立 政 治 大 學

‧

N a tio na

l C h engchi U ni ve rs it y

在文檔中 中國治理研究 - 政大學術集成 (頁 81-88)