Low carbon innovation in China: from overlooked opportunities and challenges to transitions in power relations and practices

145/150 words) This paper explores environmental innovation in the largest emerging economy – China and its potential for contributing to global transitions to low-carbon, more sustainable patterns of development. It builds on earlier studies bringing alternative forms of low(er)-technology, ‘below-the-radar’, ‘disruptive’ and/or social innovation into its analysis. In addition, however, the paper develops our understanding of low-carbon innovation by paying particular attention to issues of changing power relations and social practices; theoretical issues that need attention in the literature generally but are notably absent when studying transitions in China. This shift in perspective allows four neglected questions to be introduced and, in each case, points to both opportunities and challenges to low-carbon system transition that are overlooked by an orthodox focus on technological innovations alone. These are briefly illustrated by drawing on examples from three key domains of lowcarbon innovation: solar-generated energy; electric urban mobility; and food and agriculture.


Introduction
Scientific studies of climate change and other planetary boundaries (Rockström et al., 2009;Steffen et al., 2015) suggest current forms of development risk taking us out of the ecological 'safe operating space', requiring broad systemic changes in order to avoid unpredictable impacts at a global level. These dramatic and rapid reductions in emissions are possible only by way of radical and globally extensive transformations in the socio-technical systems that shape the production and consumption of energy in all its forms. In early 2015, we see little evidence of the systemic changes needed to mitigate climate change and to deal with other environmental crises.
China is central to achieving such a transformation: energy demand has increased with the country's rapid economic growth, averaging 10% p.a. for 30 years, so that, given factors such as its high dependence on coal -China's coal-fired power sector is the world's largest single anthropogenic source of CO 2 emissions (Harris, 2010) -the country has become the world's largest absolute carbon dioxide emitting nation. Similar developments have been observed in total energy use, as demand in other sectors, such as agriculture and transport, have also seen high and increasing demand.    1960 1962 1964 1966 1968 1970 1972 1974 1976 1978 1980 1982 1984 1986 1988 1990 1992 1994 1996 1998 2000 2002 2004 2006 2008 2010 A key question for scholars of the 'green transformation' is thus how such transformation can be achieved and maximally expedited (Schmitz 2015). Globally, the discourse of innovation has been put forward as a major way of 'fixing' climate change alongside broader arguments for developing 'sustainability-oriented innovation systems' (Altenburg and Pegels, 2012).
Similar themes have been adopted in discussions of the 'entrepreneurial state' (Mazzucato, 2013), which stress the vital role of governments, not only in driving R&D investment in strategic 'green' sectors, but also in constructing a market for innovation and in building the skilled workforce required to serve emerging areas of eco-innovation.
Therefore, not only as the world's largest greenhouse-gas emitter, but also as the world's second-largest economy, China's potential transformation to a low-carbon, climate resilient or 'post-carbon' society is a key concern for the world. This paper, based on early indications from our research in three key sectors -food and agriculture; energy; and urban mobility -finds that this transformation is still overwhelmingly conceptualized in terms of the opportunities regarding 'high-technology' innovation at the technological 'frontier'; a narrative that resonates with techno-nationalist calls from the Chinese leadership for 'indigenous' or 'independent' innovation as a driver for competitiveness and growth (Jakobson, 2007, Zhao 2010). This paper offers a different understanding of innovation that promises to be more productive in that it signals both opportunities and challenges that the high-technology-focussed approach overlooks.
Instead, this approach explores the complex, systemic and emergent nature of the multiple processes involved in transition. In particular, going beyond existing systems transition literature, this involves a re-insertion and reconceptualization of power in the process of lowcarbon transition, and greater attention to the role and habituated practices of societal actors, including users and producers. As such, both opportunities and challenges to low-carbon transition, and particularly in the context of ongoing (national) projects of development 'catch-up', emerge along four dimensions. These concern the potential systemic importance of: 1. Bottom-up, emergent vs. top-down co-ordinated innovation and transition governance (Smith et al 2005); 2. Low(er)-technology, 'below-the-radar', 'disruptive' or 'frugal' innovations vs. hi-tech innovation (Kaplinsky 2010, Breznitz andMurphree 2011); 3. Social vs. technological aspects of innovations (Smith and Ely 2015); and, 4. Innovation demand vs. supply (Bhidé 2009).
This heuristic serves to highlight the potentially significant but neglected contribution to expedited system transitions of forms of innovation that may be both particularly appropriate and effective in fast-developing societies such as China (and the other 'emerging economies'). It is also used to present our preliminary findings, as summarised in Figure 3.

Bottom-Up and Top-Down
The benefits of attending to changing social practices and power relations in Chinese lowcarbon innovation can be illustrated by studying its politics, by which we refer not only to laws and changes in formal institutions of government but the full complex system of dynamic power relations constitutive of the field.
Historically, China's national Five-Year Plans (FYPs) have played a key role in setting the country's key strategic, economic and innovation priorities, with the Sixth FYP (1981)(1982)(1983)(1984)(1985), at the start of China's Reform Era, being the first to include energy conservation effortsaround the same time that China passed the first of its environmental laws and regulations.
The 9th Five-Year Plan (1996-2000 was the first to include the term sustainable development (Geall and Pellisery, 2012), and in 1997, the 15th Party Congress listed the 'huge environmental and resource pressures caused by population growth and economic development' as major difficulties facing the Chinese population.
More recently, tackling climate change has become increasingly central to (central) government agendas. China published the first national climate-change plan of any developing country in 2007, which formalised China's commitment to addressing climatechange mitigation and adaptation, while also upholding the principle of 'common but differentiated responsibilities' and integrating climate change into other policies for national and social economic development -thus establishing that climate policies do not take priority over other national objectives (Harris, 2010). Climate change is also emphasised in the 12 th per unit of GDP (energy intensity) by 16%, a carbon intensity reduction of 17% and a target for non-fossil fuel to account for 11.4% of primary energy consumption.
China, despite dramatic transformations in its socio-economy and associated power relations, remains effectively a one-party state. The result has been a variant of 'state capitalism' (e.g. Huang, 2008;Tsai, 2007). Although privatisation of state-owned enterprises (SOEs) has proceeded apace since the 1990s (WB/DRC, 2012), the political economic domination of major SOE national champions and the associated 'cadre-capitalist alliance' (So 2003) of top party-state leaders and SOE managers has 'reached a new peak in recent years' (Zhang, 2011: 148). In 2009, the total profits of two giant SOEs (Sinopec and China Mobile) were larger than those of the largest 500 private companies. State-owned companies account for 80% of the stock market, including the three largest companies by revenues (all in the Global Fortune top 10). Nominally 'private' companies, especially national champions, are closely connected with state institutions. This also profoundly affects innovation policy, which is targeted to the techno-nationalist development of the global competitiveness of the largest and mosttechnologically advanced SOEs as forms of 'indigenous innovation' (zizhu chuangxin) in the hope of moving 'up the value chain' while (and/or as means of) preserving the party-state political regime (Zhao 2010).
Since 2006, the central government, as buyer and seller in key industries, has introduced stringent, complex and fast-changing regulations on high-tech foreign enterprises mandating high local-content requirements and transfer of proprietary technologies (Hout and Ghemawat, 2010). Through a suite of policies and investments, the country has managed to build (or acquire) world-leading firms in strategic 'green' sectors such as manufacturing solar panels and wind turbines (Lema and Lema, 2012). However, economic decentralisation has played an important role in unleashing these forces during the Reform Era. Rather than being a monolithic system, China's governance of science, innovation and environmental decisionmaking in the Reform Era -the 'state' of its 'state capitalism' -has been characterised by 'fragmented authoritarianism', with protracted bargaining between bureaucratic units, including ministries, advisory bodies and top-level 'National Leading Groups' (Heggelund, 2004), as well as horizontal fragmentation between levels of government (Economy, 2005).
Recent Chinese observers of the effects of this decentralisation note the extent to which a 'project system' logic has been instituted across government at all levels: a 'governance model between the traditional system and market mechanisms' (Tian, 2014: 1) where local governments compete for projects to attract special funding from central government.
While the 'ideological foundation' of such a system is technocratic (Tian, 2014: 3), its 'expert rationality' often acts instead as 'cover for sectoral interests and interest groups'. In practice, writes Kelly (2014: 57) such an arrangement: 'produces governance that sits uncomfortably half-way between full-scale planning signed off by ministers and the flexibility and canny differentiation of the market.' The result is compromised dynamics of innovation, with many top-down government innovation projects (e.g. in EVs and the building of associated charging infrastructures) adopted at best half-heartedly by SOEs and/or local governments tasked with the 'implementation' of innovation plans. Moreover, the political dominance of incumbent Chinese 'carbon (state) capital' in a system of innovation that remains so highly politicised and dependent on close connections with state institutions significantly hinders the emergence of potentially system-disruptive low-carbon innovations.
Conversely, non-governmental actors, institutions and discourses have greater sway over government report, of which many are 'green') and a 'green public sphere' has emerged (Calhoun and Yang, 2007, our emphasis). Concerns about environmental issues have increased among China's newly enriched middle class, with opinions expressed more freely and rapidly than ever before due to increasingly ubiquitous social media and messaging technologies. Urban protests increasingly focus around the lack of transparency and accountability concerning potentially polluting developments (Geall and Hilton, 2014), and according to some in the Chinese government, they represent the most common catalyst for 'mass incidents' or protests.
The emergence of a ('bottom-up') green public sphere is arguably crucial for power momentum behind any low-carbon transition, and for the development of the social capacities to manage and drive forward further low-carbon innovation (Smith and Ely 2015).
Yet it is still merely tolerated in China and in perpetual threat of clampdown (Jacobs and Buckley 2015). The emergence and strength of a green public sphere is thus a key challenge.
However, a major opportunity for Chinese low-carbon innovation illuminated by this perspective is the possibility of a fusion of approaches, whereby the state could deploy its China. This leads to the second and third set of issues.

Low(er)-tech & high-tech approaches
In the domain of agri-food systems

Social & technological aspects
In the field of solar-generated energy , initial research indicates that despite China having become the world's largest investor in solar photovoltaics -an IP-and R&D-intensive industry that the Chinese government has centrally supported and is now the world's largest investor, producer and exporter -systemic barriers to the installation of solar PV modules remain. Many, though not all, of these barriers have social, rather than technical, components, and these include: grid connectivity and reform, since certain policies, such as capacity-based subsidies, have driven the construction of renewable energy infrastructure without matching grid connectivity, and policies such as Feed-in-Tariffs (FiTs) have assumed higher levels of knowledge and monitoring capacity on the part of electricity consumers and local grids, respectively, than currently exists; property rights, since some approaches, including FiTs, assume energy users own their own properties or roof-spaces to install PV modules; and cost, given the relatively large up-front cost of a PV module and related costs associated with installation and replacement of sometimes unreliable supporting components, such as inverters. Conversely, in the case of solar water heaters -where fewer of these barriers exist -China has the world's largest installed capacity (REN21, 2012). These lowcost standalone systems have not only been very popular, and therefore constitute largely undiscussed agents in the transition from fossil fuels to low-carbon energy, but also indicate where closer attention to social aspects and elements of practice could point to previously unexplored potential drivers and pathways for disruptive, low-cost and low-carbon innovation.

Demand & supply
Finally, as regards the issue of demand for innovation, perhaps the clearest example of this key issue in Chinese low-carbon innovation emerges from comparison of the electric vehicle (EV, i.e. electric car) and the electric two-wheeler (E2W, or e-bike) (see . The former is the beneficiary and focus of amongst the most ambitious and concerted programmes of national industrial policy in the world for EV transitions, while the latter receives effectively no government support and is officially banned in many cities. Yet E2Ws are effectively ubiquitous in Chinese cities (even those with the municipal bans), numbering some 180 million on recent estimates, while EVs are struggling to achieve any sales beyond those bought through programmes of government procurement for taxi companies. The key issue here is that the EV has effectively no attraction to possible consumers, even with significant purchase subsidies and other financial perks, being seen as a relatively expensive but utterly unglamorous car. As such, the EV is in competition with premium, foreign (particularly German) conventional cars; vehicles, moreover, that are the focus of a consumer desire that is much more than mere utility 'preference' but bears the weight of a profound social thirst for experiences of personal autonomy and status competition that are vested specifically in consumer choices. Conversely, the E2W is a cheap, convenient and overwhelmingly indigenous technology that offers to the majority of the population the possibility of faster, cheap and utilitarian mobility.
In these circumstances, therefore, focusing on demand, not just supply, from a perspective of changing power relations and social practices suggests that the EV has little prospects of catalysing a system transition in urban mobility on its current form -basically, a standard car with a different engine. Nor will Chinese car companies likely succeed in achieving a new global dominance on the back of their mastery of this technology. The key challenge, rather, is for a Chinese EV to be developed that has unquestionable market appeal -whether directly targeting the wealthy (such as in the case of Tesla) or offering a different prospect of urban mobility that makes the EV unquestionably more cost-and time-effective. Conversely, a key opportunity thus highlighted returns us to the point made above regarding the potential for the These are only some of many preliminary possibilities, which we will also be exploring further in the course of our research. However we also now place them within the wider literature in order to better discuss these initial findings.

'High-Tech' Innovation and its Limitations
In 2014 In particular, while they provide certain insights into the politics of innovation policy, they still focus primarily on the supply side, or, like the 'transition studies' literature in general (Geels, 2002 -see next section), treat the demand side from an economic, 'market' perspective. As such, while they provide a good basis for understanding industrial development in these strategic sectors, with a few exceptions, they engage less with political and sociological questions of transition (though see Geels, 2014). The result is that where these qualitative issues are especially important and/or fraught, insight is diminished; yet this is precisely the case regarding both transition to low-carbon 'economy-and-society' (Urry, 2011) and in China in particular.

'Practices' and 'Power': Neglected Areas in Chinese Low-Carbon Innovation and Transitions
The socio-technical transitions literature opens a much more detailed, nuanced and informative analysis of the processes and progress of low-carbon innovation in China than a techno-centric approach. Yet two crucial aspects to the 'social' (and hence socio-technical) nature of innovations are: • the process of successful and widespread demonstration and deployment of an innovation beyond a specialised niche, through underlying social practices and their transformation (Smith et al., 2010); and, • whence the dynamism behind any successfully emergent system innovation, and its social provenance and character (Tyfield, 2014).
These remain under-developed in the literature on low-carbon innovation in general, with significant analytical cost, but are particularly evident gaps when analysing low-carbon innovation in China. Our approach places these considerations at centre-stage, in terms of concerted empirical and theoretical attention to the issues of social practices and power relations respectively.
As regards the former aspect, most analysis of low-carbon innovation in China focuses upon issues of production. The reception and consumption of innovations, including changes in associated social practices (Shove and Walker, 2010), is largely neglected. Social practice theorists critique the notion that behaviour (and potential behaviour change) can be understood as rational, cognitive individual processes, highlighting how practices are social, loaded with social meaning, affect and identity, habitual or routinised, systemically-situated and performative.
Such an approach sees social practices not only as mediating many of the relationships between the elements in socio-technical transitions, but also as ordering and The dynamic interplay between power relations and transitions, while its central importance has long been recognised (Smith et al., 2010), is far from well understood. There are actors who are committed to, and are likely to benefit from, significant systemic changes involved in any transition process, and often organise to try to bring it about (Smith, 2007). Yet the systemic complexity of socio-technical transitions means they are unlikely to emerge according to the blueprint of any single (set of) actor(s).
Studies of the politics of transition in Europe have begun to study these processes by looking at the interests and institutions concerned (e.g. Kern, 2011;Lockwood et al., 2013). But generally conceptualized in terms of given institutions, interests and structural inequalities in access to resources -amounting to 'techno-institutional lock-in' (Unruh 2000) -most of this literature tends both to illuminate only the structural difficulties facing emerging systems transitions, rather than strategic openings, and to take as given the basic institutional forms of politics and decision-making. However, ignoring openings lessens the potential for insights that could expedite low-carbon transitions; and the politics of decision-making are also under intense pressure to change from the profound socio-political challenges of responding to global climate change.
Both of these overlooked aspects -strategic openings, on the one hand; and changing power relations, on the other -are inescapably important issues when studying low-carbon innovation in China: first, because the need to avoid high-carbon lock-in is particularly pressing; second, because many of the institutions of liberal democratic governance are absent or ineffective in China, and because the country's low-carbon innovation policy and strategy has arguably as one of its goals the global transformation of geopolitical relations, through the mastery of key technologies. Early indications from this research therefore suggest that power might be conceptualised as not only structural and 'locked-in' (Tyfield, Ely et al., 2014) but also as "world-productive". This suggests that systems could be redefined as complex dynamic systems of power relations mediated by socio-technologies, the generation of which, in turn, conditions changing and newly enabled or constrained power relations. As summarized in Figure 4, this suggests an intelligible and empirically researchable conceptualisation of positive feedback loops of accelerating and deepening system-shifting innovation -a 'power momentum' of system emergence -where low-carbon transition is a power transition, albeit one that may unfold over several decades (Cf Arthur 2009).

Figure 4: Two Step Analysis of Emergence of a Power Socio-Technical Transition
In both Figures 4a and 4b, the model schematically describes the process of transition emergence as a strategic power relational process. Bold arrows denote the analytical focus of the step, while dotted lines denote processes understood to be happening but which are abstracted from for the purpose of this specific step in the analysis. Reconceptualizing transitions in this way thus affords a frame through the four heuristic dimensions discussed above may be not only re-introduced as central issues, but also understood and interrogated in terms of a both/and, rather than either/or, logic in respect of each dualism. The key questions, in other words, become 'how exactly do issues of top-down and bottom-up (supply and demand etc…) innovation interact at present?; how could they do so more productively, equitably and sustainably?; and with what broader implications regarding the power-relational character of societies?'

Conclusions
This paper has argued that low-carbon innovation in China represents an important case study of innovation's potential to contribute to more sustainable patterns of development. Drawing on examples from ongoing empirical work, we show how a framework attentive to issues of changing power relations and social practices can improve our understanding of low-carbon innovation in China and highlight both challenges and opportunities missed by mainstream analysis. As such, it highlights how low-carbon innovation in China could be a site of significant promise and opportunity even as high-profile projects of high-technology innovation continue to struggle to seed low-carbon systems transitions.
In all three domains discussed (solar energy, electric urban mobility and agri-food), the profoundly systemic nature of the transition required -in how China eats, moves and heats and powers its homes -and the complex interdependencies involved in such changes (including across these domains), means that any low-carbon transition is likely to have farreaching consequences and will occur in parallel with wider changes in Chinese society, culture and politics. Social and political decisions and trajectories could result in a number of different low-carbon scenarios: some in which inequality and social unrest continues to deepen, for example, and others where 'bottom-up' or 'disruptive' innovation is harnessed for poverty alleviation, or are even socially or politically disruptive in ways that affect existing power structures, including those bound up with Chinese 'carbon (state-) capital'. These are some of many preliminary findings that we will be exploring further, in the course of our research.