When does low-carbon urban renewal deliver justice in China: an fsQCA study

Unofficial AI-generated summary based on the public title and abstract. Not an official translation.

🔬研究者:Provides a novel fsQCA approach to study governance and justice in low-carbon transitions, useful for comparative climate policy research.

🏢実務担当者:Offers insights on how accountability and community inclusion affect project legitimacy, relevant for urban renewal planning.

🏛政策担当者:Highlights that cultural recognition and participatory inclusion can improve justice even under hierarchical governance, informing just transition policies.

While research on low-carbon urban renewal often prioritizes techno-economic efficiency, the socio-political dimension of justice remains undertheorized, particularly in non-Western contexts. This study addresses this gap by investigating how diverse governance configurations shape distributive justice during China's urban transitions. By integrating climate justice theory with an institutional lens, we reconceptualize low-carbon renewal as a hybrid governance process in which justice is negotiated through the interplay of top-down bureaucratic pressure and bottom-up participatory inclusion. Applying a fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis to 16 urban renewal cases, this study identifies multiple pathways leading to both just and unjust outcomes. The findings reveal that distributive justice is not merely a product of liberal democratic procedures, but emerges from context-specific configurations of accountability, participation and recognition. By highlighting the way in which justice is produced within specific political–institutional conditions, this study advances climate justice theory beyond Western-centric norms and provides a nuanced framework for the institutional production of justice in transitional settings. <b>Key policy insights</b>Distributive justice in low-carbon urban renewal emerges through diverse pathways when both accountability and culturally grounded inclusion exist.Authoritarian environmentalism produces different justice outcomes shaped by how accountability, participation and performance incentives interact.The erosion of either participatory inclusion or political accountability tends to generate distributive injustice and heighten social and spatial exclusion.Cultural recognition strengthens local responsiveness within hierarchical systems, improving the social legitimacy of low-carbon transitions in nondemocratic contexts. Distributive justice in low-carbon urban renewal emerges through diverse pathways when both accountability and culturally grounded inclusion exist. Authoritarian environmentalism produces different justice outcomes shaped by how accountability, participation and performance incentives interact. The erosion of either participatory inclusion or political accountability tends to generate distributive injustice and heighten social and spatial exclusion. Cultural recognition strengthens local responsiveness within hierarchical systems, improving the social legitimacy of low-carbon transitions in nondemocratic contexts.

• openalex https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.32480057first seen 2026-05-30 04:58:41 · last seen 2026-06-03 04:58:49