Planning for Energy Transition: Embracing an Area-Specific Approach in Urban China

Energy transition is crucial for mitigating climate change and has over the past decades risen to become a key international policy ambition. Energy transition is a highly complex, dynamic and multi-dimensional process involving a multitude of actors and networks. Energy transition is also spatially sensitive, and therefore it is crucially linked with spatial planning. Pursuing energy transition in an urban context requires institutional designs and related planning approaches that allow for area-specific solutions. There are two important and ongoing shifts in the governance of energy transition: 1) a shift from government to governance, and 2) increased decentralisation and use of area-specific approaches.

Planning for Energy Transition is particularly interested in how both these possible changes in energy governance can work out within the Chinese top-down political scheme. In response, two analytical lenses are used for studying the institutional design of Chinese urban energy governance. The first lens is that of policy implementation, with a focus on how national energy policies are impacting local energy governance. The second lens is that of integrated and collaborative strategies at a local level, with a focus on cross-sectoral working within governments and between governments and other societal stakeholders.

Planning for Energy Transition highlights the value of an area-specific and associated decentralised approach to energy transition that emphasizes integration of policy and collaboration of actors and institutions into Chinese urban governance. Capitalizing on this added value, however, depends crucially on Chinese centralized-oriented energy governance for both enabling and sufficiently stimulating local willingness and ability.