Multi-level climate governance or contested carbon exceptionalism? The (re)making of a low-carbon city in Shenzhen, China

As the world’s largest greenhouse gas emitter, China plays a decisive role in the global combat against climate change. As a result of both the central government’s campaign and policy transfers facilitated by numerous international and domestic actors, place-based decarbonization initiatives have proliferated in Chinese cities. Such initiatives and their related policy processes are not only emblematic of a multi-level governance of low-carbon placemaking; more significantly, their very nature depend on the negotiation and accommodation of local people’s discrete imaginaries and speculations of the climate agenda. We focus on the city of Shenzhen, China, to examine how low-carbon urban policy is an iterative outcome of subjective and spatialized knowledge shaped largely by the widely perceived carbon exceptionalism—a belief in the inherent legitimacy and superiority of activities and objects with carbon relevance. Put differently, the ways in which residents rationalize the unique and necessary role of carbon within the broader environmental agenda (despite the former’s obvious negative environmental impacts) present an emotional disconnect between local residents and their sustained belief in the low-carbon transition. The findings of this study are based on archival research on the Shenzhen International Low-Carbon City project, which began in the late 2000 s, as well as key informant interviews and participant observations from various project-related events. These findings underscore the importance of the affective dimensions of low-carbon transition and their significant spatial implications.