[New Paper] Governing policy experiments in Chinese cities: Lessons on effective climate mitigation
Shiran Victoria Shen
Dear Colleagues,
I’m writing to share my new paper, “Governing Policy Experiments in Chinese Cities: Lessons on Effective Climate Mitigation,” recently published in the Policy Studies Journal. It may be of interest for your research or teaching.
Link to paper: http://doi.org/10.1111/psj.70026
How do politics shape the outcomes of policy experiments?
This paper compares Chinese cities with similar goals and starting conditions—participating in the same centrally-sponsored experiments—but achieving divergent decarbonization outcomes.
Two key points:
1.
Concurrent trials are common.
Unlike the typical model, where one trial is run at a time, Chinese localities often conduct overlapping policy experiments simultaneously. These
concurrent trials interact in ways that complicate causal inference, yet they remain underexplored in existing scholarship.
2.
The paper introduces a replicable procedure to address this challenge.
Using a case-comparative analysis of Hangzhou and Xiamen, it shows that leadership priorities and policy coherence—not just formal authority—are critical for effective climate mitigation.
Best,
Victoria
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Shiran Victoria Shen
Senior Research Scholar, Precourt Institute for Energy
Faculty Affiliate, Center on China’s Economy and Institutions
Stanford University