- Business organizations and
biodiversity conservation
Previous chapters have treated population growth, enlarged agricultural and
housing footprints on the land, and actions of governments – in particular the
development of infrastructure – as major causes of ecological degradation in
China and Taiwan. In this chapter we consider the role that economic
organizations have played as drivers of environmental change. Due to the
rapid industrialization of both Taiwan and China in the post-World War II era,
our focus will largely be on business enterprises.
The chapter begins by describing the domestic organization of factories and
businesses in China and Taiwan. Then we turn to the relationships between
enterprises (and business groups) and the state, asking both about the degree
of autonomy in business organizations and the degree of penetration by the
state into the decision making of business firms. At first glance the question
may seem irrelevant to the protection of rare and endangered species and
ecosystems. Yet if the state includes important business interests in
developmental decision-making (a state-society relationship called corpora-
tism) and if environmental conservation values are among the core interests of
the State,^1 then actions of enterprises are more likely to preserve species and
ecosystems. This at least has been the experience of a number of countries
which are leaders in environmental policy globally, leading to an important
hypothesis in the literature of comparative environmental politics: corporatism
is more conducive to benign environmental outcomes than pluralism (or
other forms of state-society relationships). This discussion prefigures the
examination of environmental non-governmental organizations (ENGOs) and
civil society in Chapter 7.
A special focus of this chapter is the role that foreign multinational
corporations play in China and Taiwan. Multinationals are potential agents of
diffusion to host countries, not only of technology and capital but also of
environmental practices. We ask whether they have been progressive or
regressive forces through their operations in China and Taiwan, and consider
four cases briefly – the Lin Yuan petrochemical complex and Bayer in Taiwan,
then Shell and EDAW in China. The final section of this chapter is a test of
another hypothesis in comparative environmental politics: the ‘race to the
bottom’. We ask whether the exponential increase in the asymmetric trade
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