Developmental Environmentalism: State Ambition and Creative Destruction in East Asia’s Green Energy Transition

by Elizabeth Thurbon, Sung-Young Kim, John A Mathews

Why has East Asia emerged as the global leader in green energy industries but - until recently - lagged on carbon emission reduction? What is new and distinctive about East Asia's approach to the green energy transition? And what does this approach mean for the world? Developmental Environmentalism provides the first comprehensive account of East Asia's green energy shift. It highlights the powerful and symbiotic role of state ambition, geostrategic
competition, and capitalist market dynamics in driving forward the region's greening efforts. Through an analysis of the ambitious national strategies of China and South Korea, the authors show how state actors have pursued a distinctively East Asian approach to transforming their energy systems, involving first the
rapid creation of new green energy industries and then the coordinated destruction of fossil-fuel incumbencies. This approach - described as 'Developmental Environmentalism' - is aimed at establishing East Asian economies as leaders in the green industries of the future, while at the same time addressing the pressing environmental, social and political problems associated with the carbon-intensive industries of the past. By developing four detailed, longitudinal case studies of green industry
creation and fossil-fuel phase out in China and Korea, the authors identify the key successes and failures of East Asia's green shift to date and anticipate its most likely future trajectory.

Based on their findings, the authors reject the idea that East Asia's greening strategies are mere exercises in 'greenwashing' or fossil-fuelled 'business as usual'. Rather, there is something fundamentally transformative underway in the region at the level of elite ideation, strategic ambition, and policy action; the green energy shift represents much more than continuity in Asia's erstwhile developmental states. To execute their analysis, the authors synthesise insights from cutting-edge
Developmental State and Schumpeterian theorising. They show how state actors in East Asia are engaging in a sophisticated kind of economic statecraft, strategically harnessing the capitalist market dynamics of 'creative-destruction' to advance their transformative green ambitions through green growth.
They also assess the implications of developmental environmentalism for developed and developing countries, and the future of the global green shift in an era of geostrategic rivalry.

447 pages, Kindle Edition

Published April 15, 2023

Reviews

[Arya Harsono · Rating 5 out of 5]

Discovered via a friend's PhD thesis draft. Very academic and conceptual, and provides at the very least a comprehensive history and sequencing of China and South Korea's green industrial developments since the start of the millennium. Thurbon et al. present a compelling theoretical framework to explain the dramatic appearance of the Northeast Asian economies in greening processes, arguing primarily for the role of the state and elite ambition in driving environmental state development in these countries. I agreed most with their perspective that green strategies must be inherently connected with techno-industrial policy, "focused on solving environmental problems through economic and industrial initiatives." The contrast of this view against the more moralistic climate-related policies in Western countries echoes the comparative analysis in Dan Wang's Breakneck: China's Quest to Engineer the Future . Whether or not Thurbon et al.'s assessment accurately represents the realities of and conditions required to foster what they term 'developmental environmentalism,' we are already seeing evidence that the systems of cleaner energy sources and electrification erected by Northeast Asian economies in the last quarter century have enabled greater national stability and economic sustainability than states that continue to rely on the "petrodollar" as energy crises seem to become more and more frequent amid geopolitical conflicts. Perhaps there is a case for greater protectionism/nationalism; as Thurbon et al. note, "we might find that it is national competition (economic and geostrategic) rather than international cooperation that drives greatest action on climate change—confounding liberal assumptions that nationalism necessarily presents an obstacle to addressing collective global challenges."