China's Coal Methane: Actors, Structures, Strategies and their Global Impacts

The need for China to alleviate its energy shortage, reduce its dependence on foreign sources and mitigate its climate impact is driving a dire quest for alternative fuels. Coal Mine Methane (CMM), in this context, holds significant potential. While the 11. Five-Year Plan aimed to capture and use 10 billion m³ per year of CMM by 2010, the country achieved less than a quarter of this. This paper enquires into this puzzling outcome, which bears consequences for the world at large. China is indeed responsible for more than 40% of the world's total un-captured CMM emissions - which act as a greenhouse gas 21 times more potent than CO₂, and whose role in global warming is often underestimated, especially in short- and medium-term climate strategies. While the Chinese central government may have incentive to work towards promoting CMM, the benefits of such policies at the sub-national level are far from self-evident. National CMM policies can have significant economic and social costs at the local level, and thus their implementation can be jeopardized. Implementation of such policies is inherently ambiguous, conflicting, and as such, political. Current research on the Chinese CMM industry has largely focused on its techno-economic aspects, with little if any politico-institutional analyses. As for policy research on the larger Chinese energy sector, this seems sturdily to embody a top-down view: it mostly ends up blaming the country's decentralized governance structure and lack of a stringent implementation chain. Such top-down approaches do not help uncover 'the sinews of war': the range of less formal mechanisms, negotiations and agreements among the local actors, without which implementation does not in fact occur at the sub-national level. Nor do top-down research approaches facilitate inquiry into the way local stakeholders re-frame the meaning, content and impact of CMM policies. More generally, the top-down approaches fail to consider the significance of actions taken locally, outside the 'governmental box', and the logic behind these actions. This paper takes a 'micro' and 'bottom-up' approach in order to shed light on the political tactics needed for policy change to take place. Three provinces were selected as case studies - so as to capture the rich variation in the local implementation environment, but also to uncover the key industrial processes involved in CMM development and utilization: 1) CMM exploration in Shanxi; 2) CMM transmission and delivery across Shanxi and Henan; 3) and CMM utilization in Guizhou, respectively. In particular, the conclusions highlight the role of 'policy entrepreneurs' who often play a critical role in bridging the institutional, infra-structural, technological and financial divides. They resort to an arsenal of strategies, ranging from coalition building, to the manipulation of decision-making forums, to the strategic framing of issues and opportunities. Such actors are crucial to policy change and may act as useful allies and entry points for international donors attempting to help China move forward. (authors)