"Walking on two legs" to the accreditation of CDM? Institutional histories of CDM accredited projects in China

Abstract

The Clean Development Mechanism has been put into effect to facilitate low cost compliance of industrialized countries to the Kyoto Protocol?s aims of greenhouse gas reduction. By end 2008, China accounts for 49% of CDM projects among the Asian-Pacific countries, the latter again making 77% of worldwide CDM projects. Its role as a leading CDM actor owes China to a considerable extent to a strategy which it named "walking on two legs" and which it followed until the economic reforms in 1978. Under this policy, the government on the one hand promoted centralized, large-scale energy generating projects, while, especially for the electrification of rural areas, it relied on small-scale decentralized systems that were carried out by rural communities, i.e. production brigades. Small hydropower plants were one of the main power schemes of this time. Today, 48% of China´s CDM projects consist of hydropower projects. This observation, as well as China´s "walking on two legs" strategy, makes it an interesting case to compare which kinds of projects find their way to CDM accreditation. What is their institutional history? Who are the main stakeholders involved? Who are the beneficiaries from accreditation? Through a stakeholder survey among selected CDM projects, as well as a key stakeholder survey among projects which have not been accredited, answers to these questions should contribute to a discussion about in which aspects state intervention plays a role for making trading schemes such as the CDM successful in host countries