Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2023. xi, 358 pp. (Tables, graphs, figures.) US$45.00, paper. ISBN 9780262544825.
On July 16, 2023, US Special Envoy of Climate Change John Kerry visited Beijing to explore potential high-level climate cooperation amidst intensifying tensions between these two largest carbon emitters. This puzzle of seeking a climate partnership with a major competitor is examined comprehensively in Joanna Lewis’s Cooperating for the Climate. Broadening her prior investigation of Sino-US clean energy cooperation (Green Innovation in China, Columbia University Press, 2013), Lewis inquires into the motivations and tactics of international players, mostly states but also subnational actors, in bilateral climate and clean energy partnerships with China since the 1990s. Together with a decade-spanning compilation of a bilateral environmental agreement database, Lewis’s direct participation in US delegations, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, and NGOs offers an interdisciplinary and rich empirical account of “a continuum of technical and diplomatic benefits” (14) underscoring various Sino-North and South-South climate collaboration.
Lewis’s investigation begins with an overview of origin, development, and key challenges faced by China’s clean energy sector in the past 30 years (chapter 2). Since the reform and opening-up, a vibrant research and development (R&D) advancement in the energy sector struck a chord with national demands for rapid economic development, thereby compelling Chinese policymakers to delicately balance emission, energy consumption, and economic growth through legislation and technical innovation. Yet, coal dependency is still prevalent given various technical and political constraints faced by the renewable energy sector: geographical mismatch between energy production and demand, ineffective storage and transmission, and a state-regulated energy market.
Nevertheless, these obstacles have not precluded international partners from seeking collaboration. Chapter 3 delves into the broad landscape of China’s bilateral engagement with the North (US, UK, European Union, Canada, Japan, and Australia), the South (Brazil and India), and NGOs. Given the political nature of energy and climate in China, its international partnerships are conditioned by its counterparts’ political sentiments, technical advantages, and governance types. Ineffective coordination from the partners, such as EU members’ conflicts of interest, and changing policy due to the multiparty election exemplified in the US, can lead to inconsistency in high-level collaboration, which can be tempered by China’s one-party system, NGO collaboration, and subnational engagement with the private sector and academic institutions.
Clarifying the high-level pattern of partnership, Lewis continues to demonstrate three types of collaboration motivations and models from empirical cases (chapters 4 to 7). The first logic of collaboration embeds energy and climate into high politics that require high-level commitment and coordination (chapter 4). As instantiated by the US-China Clean Energy Research Center (CERC) (chapter 5), direct collaboration between the US Department of Energy, the Chinese Ministry of Science and Technology, and the Chinese National Energy Administrator has secured China’s official support for Sino-US technological exchange and developed a joint framework for intellectual property (IP) protection. Contra China’s previous role as the demonstrator and deployer of US technology, the CERC model of complementarity enables China to first codesign R&D with the US, and then independently demonstrate and deploy the jointly developed technology (124). Despite constraints from Sino-US competition, this politicized climate and energy collaboration between two of the greatest emitters exhibits a positive externality on multilateral climate negotiations, such as the 2015 Paris Agreement.
The second collaboration logic captured by the China National Renewable Energy Center (CNREC), an initially Danish-funded think tank, highlights Denmark’s maneuver to turn China into a recipient and market for Danish renewable energy (chapter 6). Limited by its size yet displaying global ambitions, Denmark prefers to disseminate its technical advantage through a working-level engagement with Chinese universities and NGOs, rather than a high-level political pathway. The CNREC complementarity model showcases Sino-Danish joint research based on Danish energy expertise, and renders China the sole demonstrator of this localized Danish know-how (186). By empowering Chinese energy sectors to be self-sufficient, this technology-oriented partnership with a long-term physical presence could generate an endogenous political buy-in among Chinese policymakers, and circumvent certain IP concerns to smooth out the collaboration process.
The third collaboration logic is highlighted by the China-Brazil Center for Climate Change and Energy Technology Innovation, an important diplomatic tool in South-South collaboration and solidarity (chapter 7). Climate and energy collaboration is motivated by Brazil’s pursuit of technical information transfer from China, a leading innovator in biofuel and carbon capture and storage and a main representative of the developing countries under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change negotiations. The Sino-Brazil complementarity model features Brazil demonstrating Chinese R&D and jointly deploying Chinese energy models (216).
However, this book raises three issues that warrant further contemplation. First, whereas the author justifies her selection of a bilateral lens to examine collaboration (12–14), both nation-states and subnational actors (private firms, research institutions, and NGOs) with competing goals remain relevant to climate partnerships. If states are the unit of analysis, insufficient ink is spilled in this book over how they coordinate conflicting technical and diplomatic priorities or curb bureaucratic turf wars (discussed in Olivia Gippner’s Creating China’s Climate Change Policy, Edward-Elgar, 2020). Second, for a book addressing theories of international cooperation models, it lacks empirical cases of failed collaboration to further specify the conditions under which technical and diplomatic mechanisms work. An example of a fruitless bilateral collaboration to export the Chinese environmental experience is the China-Laos land project (2008–2009) investigated by Heidi Wang-Kaeding in China’s Environmental Foreign Relations (Routledge, 2021). Finally, Lewis’s examination of China’s clean energy sector does not lead to a China-specific theorization, as we can find in Sanna Kopra’s China and Great Power Responsibility for Climate Change (Routledge, 2019), but rather offers a broad theory of international collaboration. Regardless of the author’s original intentions, it is up to the readers to decide whether this move obscures China’s subjectivity or counters the Orientalism in international relations literature.
Subject to continuous debate and discussion, Cooperating for the Climate doubtlessly offers a timely and paradigm-changing pathway to investigate the geopolitics of technological innovation for both scholars and practitioners. As China evolves from a late-coming follower to a leading innovator of clean energy and climate know-how, this shifting geography of technology and knowledge renders global political and scientific coordination necessary to tackle climate change.
Zikun Yang
University of Cambridge, Cambridge