Bringing resource management back into the environmental governance agenda: eco-state restructuring in China

The primary aim of ancient Chinese environmental governance was to efficiently manage the country’s limited natural resources; this was also reflected in the context of the hydraulic society. From the 1950s to 1960s, the utilisation of Chinese natural resources, especially for food security, dominated the development of the environmental governance agenda. As China has become urbanised and industrialised since the late 1970s, its environmental governance agenda shifted from rural centrism to urban centrism in the 1980s, and from resource management to pollution control in the 1990s, and then to carbon control in the 2000s. Thus, the establishment and evolution of the environmental protection agency attracted most attention while addressing contemporary Chinese environmental governance. However, in March 2018, the Chinese government reshaped its environmental protection agency by broadening the Ministries of Natural Resources and Ecological Environment to include pollution control and resource management. Consequently, the traditional environmental governance agenda of managing natural resources is re-emerging. This study examines why and how the environmental governance agenda of resource management has evolved in China; it then applies the theory of eco-state restructuring to describe the waves of China’s environmental governance agenda. The study contributes to the theoretical work on China’s evolving environmental governance agenda and descriptive work on the re-emerging dimensions of resource management for Chinese environmental governance.