Bondes, M. and Johnson, T.R. (2017) Beyond Localized Environmental Contention: Horizontal and Vertical Diffusion in a Chinese Anti-Incinerator Campaign. Journal of Contemporary China, 26 (106). pp. 504-520. ISSN 1067-0564
Abstract
Environmental contention is mounting all across China. In particular, protests against environmentally hazardous construction projects have become a frequent phenomenon, spreading well beyond China's major cities. While these protests are gaining growing academic attention, they have mostly been analyzed as separate phenomena in isolation from each other. Moreover, such grievance-based environmental contention has largely been investigated separately from “environmentalist” activism underpinned by environmental organizations and broader environmental concerns. Yet recent protest waves against the construction of facilities such as waste incinerators and industrial facilities reveal the emergence of linkages and diffusion processes between cases and actors that challenge depictions of Chinese environmental contention as a necessarily purely localized and parochial affair. This article examines this new development in Chinese environmental activism through a detailed case study of an anti-incinerator campaign centered on a village in Hebei Province. It shows how linkages emerged horizontally between local residents and community activists involved in anti-incinerator campaigns elsewhere, and vertically between villagers and members of China’s nascent “no burn” community, a group of actors highly critical of waste incineration in China. We conclude that both types of linkages were crucial for the development and success of the villagers’ campaign. Although opportunity for upward scale-shift based on active intra-community collaboration remains highly constrained, vertical ties and non-relational horizontal linkages ensure that the impact of environmental campaigns reaches beyond the immediate localities in which they occur.
Metadata
Item Type: | Article |
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Authors/Creators: |
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Copyright, Publisher and Additional Information: | © 2017 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. |
Dates: |
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Institution: | The University of Sheffield |
Academic Units: | The University of Sheffield > Faculty of Social Sciences (Sheffield) > Department of Politics and International Relations (Sheffield) |
Depositing User: | Symplectic Sheffield |
Date Deposited: | 08 Nov 2016 16:35 |
Last Modified: | 07 Jul 2023 16:04 |
Status: | Published |
Publisher: | Taylor & Francis |
Refereed: | Yes |
Identification Number: | 10.1080/10670564.2017.1275079 |
Open Archives Initiative ID (OAI ID): | oai:eprints.whiterose.ac.uk:106966 |