6.6.2 Discussion about Issue Attention Dynamics of Climate Change in China
6.6.2.1 The Limitation of the Traditional Perspectives
In the framework for explaining the attention dynamics in this thesis, problem indicators, focusing events and information feedback have not significantly affected issue attention, which implies that traditional theories and prevailing perspectives in agenda setting failed to perfectly explain our case of issue attention of China’s climate change. It is noteworthy that factors from traditional perspectives are all firmly and directly connected with climate change. The fact that these direct indicators can hardly stimulate the issue attention epitomizes the complexity of the climate change issue, and also illustrates that the policy system may have been sensitive to other factors instead of the climate change itself. According to the results, it can be revealed that policy system responds to politics more enthusiastically than to problem itself. The factors triggering political response like focusing events and international pressure of international agendas are the reflection of background and characteristics of the internationalization and globalization of climate change issue. The policy agenda of China in addressing climate change is embedded in the global agendas which bring about multiple and complex effects to China’s policy agenda.
Why did not the emission of greenhouse gas significantly affect issue attention? This conclusion seems to contrast with common sense. Generally, past studies usually believed that the increasing of greenhouse gas emission is the crucial factor in triggering China’s attention to climate change issue. Yet through analysis on previous studies and interviews to some important actors involved in decision making, we found that the causal mechanism between greenhouse gas emission and China’s issue attention on climate change hinges on international pressures. As a result, the issue attention of China’s climate change was actually sensitive to the pressures caused by greenhouse gas before.
Extreme meteorological disasters have not been able to effectively trigger issue attention to climate change. As has been mentioned before, the fact that extreme meteorological disasters have increased and intensified more than ever is a general and macro trend caused by climate change, but it is very hard to blame climate change for a specific meteorological disaster. Hence, the theory that the vulnerability of climate system accompanied by the serious disasters would trigger the attention and agenda to address climate change cannot be supported by this empirical analysis. As information feedback,
policy cycles did not significantly affect issue attention to climate change, which means that the time when policy goals were set or the policy performances were evaluated did not open the opportunity to promote policy attention. The reason for this might be that climate change was subordinate to other policy goals which are not oriented towards addressing climate change.
6.6.2.2 The Feasibility and Discussion of Extended Theory
This research extended theory about agenda setting based on the traditional perspectives, and constructed dynamic models to explain the change of issue attention on climate change in China. The results supported the hypotheses derived from the theoretical models. This study tried to move beyond the conventional perspective that is usually focused on a single or an isolated policy subsystem, and integrate trans-subsystem ideas into policy agenda theory to improve the understanding on complicated issues spanning multiple areas such as climate change, which is in line with the appeal to construct boundary-spanning policy regime (Jochim&May, 2010). Empirical results demonstrate the crowd-in effects of attention between policy issues. It is found that the attention on environmental problems had significant effect on promoting issue attention of climate change. Although it has been already noticed that climate change agenda is associated with environment agenda in some aspects, their associations and interactions have not been deeply examined with empirical evidence. This study has made an attempt to bridge this gap, which could be expected to improve the understandings about policy agenda setting especially for emerging complex issues such as climate change. Crowd-in effect is a mutual interaction and influence between and policy subsystems, which may results from various causes. First of all, this effect could come from the preference change of policy system. For example, the increase of the focus on the environment problems may be caused by the preference shift to environment within certain period of time, and this shift would generate spillover effect which would enable other related issues to gain more attention. Additionally, there exists synergy effect between addressing environmental pollution and climate change, for they encompass similar and overlapping governance mechanism and policy tools. Hence, the increase of the attention on environment issues will stimulate the increase of issue attention of climate change.
Furthermore, there might also be the case that the they may take advantage of each other to enhance the possibility to gain attention—when the attention is focused on the
environment problems, the advocates of climate change issue will borrow the salience of environment issues to increase the issue attention of climate change. Of course, answering these questions is not included in the research framework of this thesis, yet the insight given by the empirical evidence in this thesis makes it more worthwhile to further discuss these questions.
This research took the international pressures into account in modeling attention dynamics of climate change in China, which has extended the model of agenda setting in terms of the spatial boundary. The empirical result shows that the international pressures has significant positive effect on China’s issue attention of climate change. In the former studies on China’s policy process of climate change, the influence of international politics was a persistent topic. However, most of them tried to explain the attitude of China’s government in climate change issue from the perspective of political rationality, rare empirical evidence being provided to illuminate the influence of global politics and agendas in framing domestic issue attention and agendas. Yet, this research contends that climate change, as a boundary-spanning issue, its issue attention and agenda setting have been promoted and affected by the international pressures. On one hand, this demonstrates the pressure-response pattern of China’s issue attention on climate change.
On the other hand, it worth noting that in studying policy process of climate change, we should invest more on establishing a more comprehensive model by synthesizing global politics and international agendas. With the globalization of the environment for policy making, research on the interactions between international politics and domestic policies should move beyond the perspective of international relations and synthesize it with the conventional public administration and policy process theories to address the challenge of boundary-spanning issues.
In this research, policy knowledge, as information feedback, did not have the significant effect in triggering issue attention of climate change in China. It’s worth noting that it does not underplay the critical role of policy knowledge in policy process, especially with regard to complex issues such as climate change. For the objective of this research is the issue attention of climate change, the results only indicated that policy knowledge have not played an important role as expected in policy agenda setting which is the front step of policy process. Climate change is extremely complex, so there is no doubt that policy knowledge plays a very crucial role in decision making. But based on the empirical study of climate change case in China, its role of focusing issue attention
and framing policy agenda could not be supported.
Conclusion and Discussion
This thesis focused on China’s climate change issue, mainly analyzing both the evolution and dynamics of attention from the perspectives of “issue space” and “attribute space”, and explaining the history of climate change issue in China in terms of dimensional structure of issue attention. This paper adopted the method of content analysis which was used to extract and measure issue attention to climate change, and illustrated how the issue attention to climate change in China developed and evolved. In addition, on the basis of theories and observations, this thesis proposed a dynamics model of China’s issue attention to climate change. Through solid evidence, it furthermore analyzed the factors that exert significant impacts on China’s issue attention to climate change in short term and long term. This chapter, as the discussion and conclusion of this thesis, first will summarize main conclusion of this thesis, then analyze its innovation points, and finally bring up its weaknesses and prospects.