Techno-economic rationalities as a political practice in urban environmental politics in China
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article argues that techno-economic rationalities dominate urban environmental policy interventions and sustainability discourses in China. This is so despite recent trends toward diversification of actors and participatory approaches in environmental governance. The paper is based on material collected through interviews with public officials, urban planners, researchers, companies, and nongovernmental organizations working with sustainability issues in cities in China. Our empirical material shows that diversification of actors does not translate into a diversification of policy discourses. Instead, groups with technical expertise or economic resources dominate processes of environmental governance. To explain this tendency, we draw on insights from theories of technocracy. We argue that the concept of techno-economic rationalities explains why considerable leverage over sustainability-related policy decisions is created for non-state actors with access to technical expertise or economic resources, while groups who lack such resources are permanently excluded. In the case of China, this means systematically overlooking social and environmental priorities, which may cement nondemocratic decision making and increase social tensions.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.007 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.007 | 0.018 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".