The pragmatism of continual failure: environmental policy as experimentation in China

Faced with stifling levels of airborne pollution, Chinese citizens hold the state accountable, demanding solutions through effective environmental policy. To reduce emissions, the state has set up experimental pilot carbon markets, where potential failure is cast as integral to continuing improvement. Those in charge of conceptualizing and implementing these experiments, namely carbon bureaucrats, consultants, and developers, feel their public responsibility acutely, sharpened by personal anxieties about pollution and health. But they also often perceive these carbon markets as doomed to fail, in absolute terms, in delivering decarbonization goals. Those charged with realizing carbon markets are therefore caught between, on the one hand, policy failure being folded into continual, pragmatic experimentation and, on the other, their embodied knowledge that such progressive, positively freighted failure is in fact terminal.