Institutionalized governance processes

Both China and the US have developed distinct governance processes to address environmental issues. The dominant processes of environmental governance in China take the form of (i) many laws but state planning is dominant and (ii) intermediate crisis scanning procedures and policy responses on an irregular or episodic basis outside the confines of the Five-Year Plans or other national plans. The parallel processes in the US involve (i) law-centered practices including the enactment of legislation, the promulgation of regulations, and the judgments of courts and (ii) federalism/multi-level governance featuring initiatives/innovations at national and sub-national levels of government and policy diffusion. These institutionalized governance processes are more deeply embedded in the political and social systems of the two countries than the range of factors commonly considered in discussions of policy instruments. Both sets of institutionalized governance processes produce successes in addressing environmental problems under some conditions and failures under others. But the determinants of success in the two systems are not the same, and there is no reason to expect the two systems to converge during the foreseeable future. The analysis of environmental problem solving in China and the US illustrates the power of the general idea of institutionalized governance processes as a basis for research on comparative politics in a wide range of settings.