Towards growth-driven environmentalism: the green energy transition and local state in China

China is recognised as the leading country in the green energy transition. Different from the literature that emphasises the role of the powerful central state, this article reveals how China's green energy strategies and policies can also be reshaped by local dynamics. Based on ethnographic research in 2022 and interviews with local officials and villagers, this article interrogates the building of ‘the world's largest desert photovoltaic (PV) power base’ in Dalad, an Inner Mongolian county in northwest China. The article makes two arguments. First, the base project should be seen as a product of what I term ‘growth-driven environmentalism’, which characterises the local state's mediation between the top-down energy strategies and the bottom-up developmental needs. Second, while the base project may be viewed as a successful climate action in its own right, it obscures the concurrent acceleration of coal-based industrial growth and entrenches the energy-based development model in Dalad. This article offers a theoretical contribution to our understanding of the role of the local state in reconstructing and reshaping the green energy transition, alongside the powerful central state, and suggests that understandings of the global green energy transition must step past the macro picture to understand what is on the ground.