J

esse Rodenbiker’s (2023) Ecological States: Politics of Science and Nature in Urbanizing China contributes significantly to the debates on the role and formation of the ecological state. Discussions on the ecological state, or eco-state, can be traced back to the late 2000s and early 2010s when sustainability and low-carbon emission policies started to prevail across all levels of government. In their agenda-setting piece, Jonas and Gibbs (2010) see the widespread adoption of sustainable, eco, or green policies as the emergence of a new mode of environmental governance, restructuring state–economy–environment relations in ways that reflect political struggles surrounding competing ecological agendas. This “eco-state restructuring” process reorganizes state powers, capacities, regulations, territorial structures, institutional pathways, and strategic projects that are deemed to be less environmentally damaging than previous trajectories. The eco-state, therefore, is a state that takes a more active and direct role in regulating the environmental inputs and outputs of mainstream economic and social activities, organizing and mobilizing strategic interests and actors to undertake specific projects and activities that the state understands to be consistent with strategic environmental goals and outcomes set at international and national levels (While et al. 2010:81).

The conceptualization of eco-state restructuring reflects scholars’ efforts to understand how the state manages the environment, especially under the capitalist state perspective derived from the experience in the Global North and West (Jessop 2007). Nevertheless, how would the eco-state operate differently in other contexts and outside the Global West and North? Jesse’s book for sure provides an answer to this question. It also complements previous scholarship on China’s urban planning regime transitions and eco-city developments (Wu 2015, Chang 2016) by bringing in peri-urban eco-development projects in China to detail the mechanisms and processes of how the ecological state functions across various locations and scales.

In the first three chapters, the book traces the origin of China’s ecological state back to systems science thinking. The book argues that systems science thinking leads to a planning regime that uses functional land zoning practices as the primary means to achieve ecological civilization, contributing to the belief that an ecological society should be an urban society. This planning regime operates based on aesthetic politics through two modes: ecology as pristine nature, and ecology as a technically enhanced natural object. When operating on the ground, such aesthetic politics require the ecological state to use a range of (re)territorialization strategies – i.e., consolidation through multi-functional zoning and dispersion of development and management functions to control the land through urban–rural masterplans. The detailed account of the mechanisms and processes involved in the planning regime of China’s ecological state greatly enriches our empirical understanding of China’s pursuit of ecological civilization in the past two decades.

Nevertheless, the book doesn’t end here. Building on the structural analysis of the planning regime, the second half of the book further explores how people’s livelihoods are influenced by and also interact with the ecological state. While the book details context-specific micro-management strategies that demonstrate the ruthless and violent nature of the ecological state, it also reveals the agency of local residents. Captured through the “volumetric politics” concept, the book documents how local residents actively resist and negotiate with the ecological state. The displaced residents are not merely victims of eco-development processes. Some residents managed to accumulate wealth by exploiting compensation schemes, a process this book calls “accumulation through displacement.” The residents’ agency is also well reflected in their differentiated aesthetic emplacement of rural life in their daily practices and mundane routines, which counter the state’s logic of ecological optimization and strategic functional zoning that aims to urbanize the rural population.

Focusing on the residents’ coping strategies, the second half of this book makes a valuable contribution to our understanding of livelihood transitions during land dispossession processes. Influenced by David Harvey’s conceptualization of “accumulation by dispossession,” contemporary political economy still primarily pictures those being dispossessed as powerless victims with limited agency. Nevertheless, this book challenges such conceptualization by meticulously documenting how local residents mobilize resources and pursue their own versions of ecological developments. The findings in this book not only resonate with my previous work on “accumulation by relocation” in eco-city development (Chang 2019) and recent scholarship on speculative urbanism (Leitner and Sheppard, 2023), but also provide a structuration perspective of the dynamic, complex, and plural nature of the ecological state in China across different locations and scales – hence the plural “ecological states” as the book’s title suggests. 

Altogether, this book provides many empirical insights into the role of the state in China’s urban transformation processes and engages with the theoretical debates on territoriality and the formation of the ecological state. For people who care about China’s environmental governance and urbanization processes, this book is a must-read. For people who only have general interests in environmental issues, I also think this book is worth reading. As China continues to pursue ecological development and assumes leadership roles in global environmental governance, it is indeed important for us to understand how China’s environmental governance regime operates. The epilogue poses the question of how China’s ecological state extends beyond its sovereign boundary and shapes China’s role on the global stage. Although this question largely goes beyond the scope of this book on ecological state formation inside China, I do think it is an important question for us to explore in order to form a more comprehensive understanding of contemporary environmental governance. This book provides the foundation to explore this extra-territoriality and different versions of China’s ecological states – maybe it could be Jesse’s next book project?

Reference

Chang, I- C. C. (2019). Livelihood transitions during China’s ecological urbanization: An ethnographic observation. Remaking Sustainable Urbanism: Space, Scale and Governance in the New Urban Era, 161-183. 

Chang, I-C. C., Leitner, H., & Sheppard, E. (2016). A green leap forward? Eco-state restructuring and the Tianjin–Binhai eco-city model. Regional Studies, 50(6), 929-943.

Jessop, B. (2007). State power. Polity. 

Leitner, H., & Sheppard, E. (2023). Unleashing speculative urbanism: Speculation and urban transformations. Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space, 55(2), 359-366.

Rodenbiker, J. (2023). Ecological states: Politics of science and nature in urbanizing China. Cornell University Press.

While, A., Jonas, A. E., & Gibbs, D. (2010). From sustainable development to carbon control: eco‐state restructuring and the politics of urban and regional development. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 35(1), 76-93.

Wu, F. (2015). Planning for growth: Urban and regional planning in China. Routledge.

 I-Chun Catherine Chang is Associate Professor of Geography at Macalester College. Her research and teaching interests include global urbanism, policy mobilities, and urban transformations in Asia.

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