Greening East Asia, The Rise of the Eco-Developmental State is a timely effort to integrate our understanding of environmental action in four major countries of East Asia. China, Japan, South Korea and Taiwan vary in development, size and type of government (the authors call Taiwan a country, while acknowledging that it does not have international legal recognition but operates as a self-governing unit in all ways that the other states do). This book steps beyond the democracy/autocracy binary to point out the many ways that they have followed a similar development pathway, just at different times.
This volume offers three commonalities in the shift toward an environmental focus. The first is clear from the title, the concept of the eco-developmental state, but two more help our understanding – Stevan Harrell's elucidation of the Environmental Kuznets Curve (EKC) that delineates the pollution and remediation pathways all four have taken, and the importance of knowledge diffusion and cross-border learning to both state activity and civil society action.
Mary Alice Haddad and Harrell place the growing concern with environmental outcomes within the context of states that “have staked their popular legitimacy on economic development and the material benefits that such growth brings to their citizens” (p. 5). This long-standing approach to politics that prioritizes material wellbeing is critical to understanding the choices both governments and citizens make. The eco-developmental state concept ties in well with the EKC, because both claim that as citizens become wealthier they will prioritize environmental health and enjoyment as part of an overall material wellbeing. The result is that there is a similar trajectory of polluting first and remediating thereafter: even specific measures are often remarkably similar despite the diverse regimes and the different times in which they industrialized.
Not all environmental problems get addressed or get addressed with equal success, and the insight of this book is to dig into these specific issue areas rather than generalize about government types. The issue-specific nature of responses is nicely brought together in a table in the EKC chapter (p. 247) that illustrates how costs, the levels or public interest and mobilization, and the time scale of both the impacts and the clean ups vary widely, but they do so regardless of regime type. Drawing out these similarities helps us understand that issues like groundwater depletion or biodiversity loss are unlikely to have broad public action in China, not because of its regime type, but because of the issue type. It also helps us understand why air pollution is an issue where despite Chinese government barriers to mobilization, we have seen protests, as well as more sophisticated actions discussed in the chapter on grassroots action by Jingyun Dai and Anthony J. Spires.
There are, of course, issues where there is not one development path. One of the most visible is nuclear energy, where the impact of the 2011 Fukushima accident has transformed the energy mix in Japan and reinforced antinuclear sentiment in both Taiwan and Korea. At the same time, after a brief pause to review safety protocols nuclear construction has been moving ever more rapidly in China. Dai and Spires detail how civil society is often most effective in China when it frames its efforts as alignment with government goals. This contrasts sharply with the activism in Taiwan described by Hua-mei Chiu and Hsi-wen Chang. Whether citizens fight pollution or nuclear waste dumps, because of the pro-development orientation of both major parties, outside opposition is more likely to be effective. But in China the public has little room for manoeuvre in areas where government and public opinion are unlikely to align, including nuclear power and genetically modified crops.
Despite these very real differences, many of the cases in the book illustrate enormous knowledge diffusion across the region. The challenge of overplanning rural villages in South Korea and China is not only similar, but, in fact, the result of similar development trajectories and intellectual influences. In South Korea, Chung Ho Kim can look at the aftermath of such efforts, while the Chinese state is still very much actively moving villagers and creating potentially unsustainable arrangements on the Chengdu plain, as Daniel Benjamin Abramson describes in one of the most detailed and contextualized pieces in the collection.
From the efforts to protect rural areas through tourism development to Chinese parents’ desire to help their children find a connection to nature, a response to rapid urbanization and a longing for a rural past also permeates the region. As Rob Efird details, Chinese nature education draws directly from Japan, but interestingly both nature education and its opposite, the planned village agglomeration managed by government, are originally inspired by US thinkers. The shared development pathway is driven not just by economics, but by ideas.
These countries’ development pathway has been carbon intensive, and thus their most pressing challenge is carbon mitigation. Here is perhaps the largest difference between China and its neighbours. For while many of the actions detailed by Joanna Lewis and Iza Ding on China and Eunjung Kim on Japan and Korea are similar – decarbonization has to be some combination of efficiency and fuel substitution – China's international role is outsized. Even with domestic challenges, China is, as Lewis says, a “de facto global laboratory” (p. 51) with global implications. The question left unanswered is whether the eco-developmental model is capable of the type of step change needed to avoid catastrophic climate change.
