4 Tania Lewis
Shifting environments: From governance to civility
While this book is primarily focused on questions of lifestyle and the practices
of ordinary people across a range of South and East Asian sites, clearly such
activities need to be understood within the contexts of governmental politics and
policies in relation to climate change recognition and mitigation, the presence (or
absence) of environmental movements, and the level of civil society engagement
across the region. Space prohibits mapping the specific genealogy of each and
every country, but suffice it to say the region is shaped by considerable diversity
in terms of political, governmental, and civic responses to environmentalism.
For instance, while Japan is often assumed to be a leader in environmentalism
(particularly in the post-Fukushima context), historically it has been marked
by a relatively weak political response to environmental concerns such as the
anti-pollution movements of the 1960s and 1970s, with much of the action in
the contemporary sustainability space occurring at the level of local grassroots
organizations (Ku 2011, p. 223) and lifestyle movements (Vinken 2010) such as
the Sloth club, Japan’s equivalent of the slow movement.
In Korea, on the other hand, the rise of the environmental movement has been
closely tied to democratization and national-political structures and processes
(Ku 2011). While the movement, following a period rapid industrialization, was
initially driven by the victims of pollution in the 1980s, in the 1990s and 2000s
it expanded its political focus and legitimacy through various environmental and
civil society groups, setting its sights on larger political reform. In 2008, on South
Korea’s sixtieth anniversary, the president declared that the country’s development
over the next 60 years would be oriented toward “Low Carbon Green Growth”
while the Korean Ministry of Environment (MOE) introduced a GreenCard
initiative in July 2011 that rewards card holders with points and benefits for various
environmentally friendly practices, including purchase of eco-certified products
and conservation of household energy. The MOE announced on April 15 that the
number of cardholders surpassed 2 million people on April 13 (Jungyun 2012).
In Taiwan, while the KMT (or Chinese Nationalist Party) had previously largely
repressed the environmental movement, as in Korea, the 1980s was marked by
a growing environmental consciousness and the emergence of environmental
protests in relation to incidences of pollution (Weller 1999). After the lifting of
martial law in 1987, the environmental movement developed rapidly. Though
green politics have not become mainstream to anywhere near the extent they have
in Korea, the country has one of the few Green parties in the region, with interest
in the party boosted by anti-nuclear protests in the wake of Fukushima (although
it receives a very small percentage of the national vote; Ku 2011).
Finally I spend some time discussing China, which offers one of the more
complex evolving pictures of environmental politics, governance, and emerging
civil and grassroots movements in the region. On the one hand, with its continued
massive reliance on coal, China is one of the world’s major polluters and can
now lay claim to being the largest carbon emitter in the world.^1 At the same time,
the Chinese government has developed a series of major policy and economic