Environmental discourses in China’s urban planning system: A scaled discourse-analytical perspective

The past two decades have witnessed a growing body of research that draws on post-structuralist theory to interrogate environmental discourses in planning. Grounded in the interpretative tradition, this approach rejects essentialist ontology to assume environmental discourses being socially constructed and linked to different policy arenas at multiple geographical scales. Widely applied in the environmental politics and planning studies in advanced capitalism, the scaled discourse analysis has not yet been deployed in China’s context. This paper will use this approach to interpret the political and scalar construction of the environmental discourses in China’s urban planning system. It has developed two primary arguments. First, there exist multiple narratives of ‘environment’ instead of a single narrative. The environmental discourses in planning depend on how the political regime makes sense of environmental phenomenon rather than simply the urgency of that phenomenon. The second argument builds upon the first one to contend that the formation and legitimisation of environmental discourses in planning is a power-laden process through which multiple narratives are contested at interlocking scales. These arguments are elaborated upon through a discussion of the changing environmental discourses in four post-1978 master plans of Guangzhou, the capital city of Guangdong Province in South China.