The Missing Puzzle to Achieving People-Centred Urban Development and Ecological Governance for Climate Change in China

Abstract

"Is people-centered urban development in China achievable through institutionalizing urban ecological governance in a top-down fashion, for repairing urban environments and mitigating climate change impacts at the city level, and scaling it up to the national and even global level? Ecological civilization, the development paradigm and national environmental policy framework behind the people-centered urban development goals, conveys a deep, philosophical and humanistic connotation. Chinese cities may be able to reduce environmental externality and achieve people-centered development goals efficiently, given the government’s highly centralized power and political determination. However, whether people-centered urban development in China can truly be sustainable in the long term, relies upon the variety of human needs it recognizes and the efforts it takes to fulfill them for people to co-exist well in a collective society. The people-centered urban development in China backed by the concept of ecological civilization recognizes the universal human need and equity for quality nature and presumes providing quality nature would be sufficient to achieve sustainability. Such a view underestimates people as only being the beneficiaries of quality nature and fails to grasp and expand people’s potential capability to also be the primary means for quality nature. Genuine people-centeredness requires taking into account the cultural, aesthetic and political functions of human agents and their higher need to actualize these functions through participation. Such is needed for Chinese cities to govern natural ecological environment and develop sustainably in the long term, transcending the physical equilibria of human-nature relationship for achieving true ecological civilization"