Translation and the Sustainable Development Goals

Cultural Contexts in China and Japan

Meng Ji, Chris G. Pope

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780429535130
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Economics
• Subtopic: Sustainable Development
• Index: Economics

This book offers insight into the use of empirical diffusionist models for analysis of cross-cultural and cross-national communication, translation and adaptation of the United Nation's (UN) Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).

The book looks at three social analytical instruments of particular utility for the cross-national study of the translation and diffusion of global sustainable development discourses in East Asia (China and Japan). It explains the underlying hypothesis that, in the transmission and adaptation of global SDGs in different national contexts, three large groups of social actors encompassing sources of information, mediating actors and socio-industrial end-users form, shape and contribute to the complex, latent networks of social engagement. It illuminates how the distribution within these networks largely determines the level and breadth of the diffusion of global SDGs and their associated environmentalist norms.

This book is an essential read for anyone interested in sustainable growth and development, as well as global environmental politics.

1 The growing sustainability discourse

 

In the wake of the Paris Agreement (Accord de Paris) of 2015, many have suggested optimistically that the world is on the cusp of a possibly radical transition from carbon-based energy to renewable energy. Indeed, 2015 was a historic milestone in the world’s response to climate change. It provides an appropriate starting point to discuss the transition to renewable energies. For in this year most of the world’s nations agreed to the terms spelled out in the Paris Agreement, which was adopted by consensus at the 21st Conference of the Parties of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). Nation-states across the globe, including China and Japan, the geographical foci of this book, jointly were brought together for ‘a common cause to undertake ambitious efforts to combat climate change and adapt to its effects, with enhanced support to assist developing countries to do so’ (UNFCCC 2018). In the same year, the UN announced the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), abbreviated hereon as ‘UN SDGs’, which comprise a universal set of targets and indicators that ‘UN member states will be expected to use to frame their agendas and political policies over the next 15 years’ (Ford 19 January 2015). While this covers a range of issues and the UN makes no formal connection between the UN SDGs and the Paris Agreement, both set out an agenda to socialize nations by imputing environmental norms into models of development and growth. That is, the goals do not simply fixate on greenhouse gas emissions in the energy sector but also incorporate actions needed to be taken in agriculture, forestry, heavy industries, transport, and so on. These require nations to cooperate with respect to terrestrial, coastal and marine ecosystems (Leong 14 December 2015).

However, though there are indeed a number of the reasons for optimism regarding the transition to renewable energy, which have formed the basis of this book, this discussion is carried out in the subsequent chapters. Here, we start with a more concerned and phlegmatic explanation over the drawbacks and limitations to these existing frameworks of global governance to contextualize the issue at hand. To begin, despite exciting developments in renewable energies technology and implementation, few would argue that the global political economy is not still heavily wedded to greenhouse gas emitting energy resources. Moreover, the US, one of the largest emitters of greenhouse gases overall and per capita, has signalled its intent to pull out of the Paris Agreement which itself ‘contains no mandatory provisions to report adaptation strategies or commitments’ (Mann and Wainwright 2018: 75). Further, while one major goal established in the Paris Agreement is to limit the average rise in global temperature to below 2°C of pre-Industrial levels by 2100 (Xu and Ramanathan 2016), this target by no means guarantees the planet’s safety. For example, a systematic screening which used the climate model ensemble that informs the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) showed that there is no ‘safe’ level of global warming, with evidence of thirty-seven forced regional abrupt changes that will arise as the planet warms, eighteen of which occur even if the Paris Agreement is successful (Drijfhout et al. 2015).

In addition to this, despite the uncertainty surrounding ‘safe’ limits of planetary warming, Kevin Anderson and Alice Larkin (née Bows), two prominent climate change researchers, note that the impacts associated with a 2°C rise in global temperature have been revised upwards, such that 2°C represents ‘the threshold between dangerous and extremely dangerous climate change’ (Anderson and Bows 2011: 20). Limiting the planet to a mere ‘dangerous’ level of climate change appears to be what extent the UN, as the global governing authority over the issue, publicly considers to be attainable and that assessment may be overly optimistic. Due to the very fact that there is no safe limit, staying well below an increase in global temperatures of 2°C is a task of seminal importance. Additionally, how rapid and drastic changes may combine is an issue of enormous complexity and identifying the proximity of oncoming climate tipping points is beleaguered with uncertainty also (Lenton 2013). Meanwhile, the planet has already warmed by 1°C and it is projected to rise to 3–5°C unless there is a rapid and unprecedented response, which, on balance, does not appear to be forthcoming. Indeed, a recent statistically based probability forecast suggests there is a 5 per cent chance of the world keeping to 2°C and a 1 per cent chance of temperatures staying below 1.5°C, the preferred target of the Paris Agreement, by 2100. With these being the widely accepted thresholds of statistical significance in social scientific research, then, we might conclude, even if only for emphasis, that the aims of the Paris Agreement are practically unattainable.

Nonetheless, the setting of the two targets of 2°C and 1.5°C in average global temperature rise is to encourage coordination to avoid climate catastrophe. This is considered necessary given that energy monoliths have declared the existence of 2.8 teratonnes of carbon reserves and the industry as a whole invested US$674 billion on exploration and development of fossil fuels in 2011 alone (Mason 2015). Meanwhile, substantial deregulation has occurred within the national polities of the perceived world-leaders of the international community, as epitomized by the US under the Trump administration (2017–). For example, in June 2017 President Trump signalled the US’s withdrawal from the Paris Agreement in the coming years, at the same time as he supported enormous natural gas and tar sands projects – a kind of ‘dirty oil’ – in Alberta, Canada. These projects are advocated not only by key figures in the current US Republican leadership, but also by the comparatively socially liberal figures of the previous administration such as Barack Obama, former President Bill Clinton and senior Democrat Hillary Clinton, as well as the prime minister of Canada, Justin Trudeau (Mason 2015; Austen and Krauss 25 January 2017).

This inconsistent and, some would argue, irresponsible approach to achieving carbon reduction for the latter and outright refusal to acknowledge reality in the case of the former¹ serves not only to directly decrease the likelihood of the world meeting its threshold on global temperature rise, but also sets a precedent for the rest of the world in committing to the substantial reform necessary. Indeed, it is widely acknowledged that the global energy sector is a central component of geopolitical thinking among policymakers around the world. For example, the expansion of new hydrocarbon industries promoted domestically by the Obama administration were considered to play the dual role of bolstering US energy security and bridging the transition of global energy from oil and coal to clean energies (Grieves 13 October 2016), despite the empirically backed assessment that the substantial use of all fossil fuels, including hydrocarbons, must be phased out within the coming years for there to be a chance of the world keeping to the targets set out by the Paris Agreement (e.g. Anderson and Broderick 2017). Further, it is possible that the creation of these new hydrocarbon industries within the US led Saudi Arabia to let the price of oil fall, impacting on oil-exporting countries such as Russia and Venezuela and in a time of oncoming climate disaster causing an over-supply of oil and gas (Mason 2015: 248; Klein 2017: 77). Either way, signals emanating from global markets and the corridors of global political power do not suggest the full-fledged commitment necessary in order to respond efficaciously to climate change.

In addition, Oil Change International, an organization campaigning to promote the transition to clean energy, warns us that, in order to adhere to the Paris Agreement, every new and undeveloped fossil fuel reserve must stay in the ground (Oil Change International 2016; Klein 2017: 72). In fact, leading climate scientists inform us that 886 gigatonnes of carbon must stay in the ground for there to be a one-in-five chance of keeping global warming below 2°C. That is, starting from the year 2000. As of 2015, no more than 470 gigatonnes of carbon dioxide can be emitted to keep to 2°C, as approximately half has already been consumed, while there essentially is no reasonable chance of adhering to the 1.5°C benchmark without ‘overshooting’ and relying on Carbon Capture and Storage technologies to lower global temperatures (Johnson 4 September 2012; Mason 2015; Mattauch 9 May 2016).

For these reasons, it is widely accepted that striving to adhere to these targets demands the mobilization of all sectors of society and the international community. The response to climate change has therefore constituted a variety of actors, ranging from international organizations, state, market and societal actors, who have tended to adopt a ‘problem-solving’ approach to the risks of climate change. The aim here has been to accept and make the ‘prevailing social and power relationships and the institutions into which they are organised’ run more smoothly by addressing the source of a particular problem (Cox 1981: 128–9 in Hook et al. 2017: 193). Of course, the extent to which this practice has been successful is debatable, but the point emphasized here is that it is carried out within the established framework for climate action. Those who take issue with the so-called ‘problem-solving’ approach mostly do so on the grounds that this does not go far enough to solve the problem, given that the system itself is the source. Instead, it is argued that what is required is a transformation of the global political-economic order as well. For example, many suggest that the elite top-down approach to climate mitigation and adaptation as embodied by the UN will prove insufficient, if it has not done so already, and that more radical state intervention, a committed and relentless political activism and other non-market mechanisms are necessary to challenge the economic order that has resulted in the oncoming chaos, by, to a large extent, granting similar privileges to the fossil fuel industries through enormous subsidization. These may be considered a ‘critical-theory’ approach to climate change (see Hook et al. 2017: 193–4), in which these so-called ‘prevailing social and power relations’ and institutions are not taken-for-granted but called into question by considering their origins (e.g. Klein 2013, 2017), or how they are changing or may change in the near future (e.g. Szerszynski et al. 2013; Mann and Wainwright 2018).

To put this to one side, however, even if a sufficiently broad, global and rapid transition to renewable energy and other sustainable practices through frameworks such as the UN SDGs, which encourage state intervention and are reliant on market mechanisms, were attainable, such a transition would impact significantly on human lifestyles, as indeed would an insufficient business-as-usual approach to ecological breakdown. Thus either way we can assume that the existing model of economic production and consumption and the political order upon which it is established will be faced with enormous pressures to adapt, whether to a response with the requisite size, intensity and rapidity necessary to keep to the Paris Agreement by 2100, or not. This will likely create new modes of economic, political and social organization. However, even though the result of this transition remains an ‘unknown’, it does not demand an extensive level of prescience to adduce that the scope of possible scenarios in responding to climate change is, at the very least, extreme. Therefore, academic inquiry into the nature of change is highly relevant to the gamut of disciplines in the social sciences, as stated in the introduction.

Further, as stated, our aim is to contribute to the literature a corpus-based analysis into the social diffusion and communication of sustainable development discourses as the world strives towards achieving the goals established in the Paris Agreement and UN SDGs. Indeed, such frameworks aim to normalize an ethic of environmentalism to instil a commitment among states toward climate mitigation and adaptation. However, although put forward as mutually complementary strategies to tackle climate change, the definition over the contents and ways of implementation of these two approaches are left to member-states, meaning that ‘room remains for states to reinterpret these international efforts’ (van der Does-Ishikawa and Hook 2017: 101, emphasis in original). Due to this, not just in-depth analyses of the mechanism of global governance to combat climate change but also how this norm of environmentalism is ‘translated’ by the nation-state in terms of specific policies, social and legislative changes and so on, are also of seminal importance to monitor and assess the ways in which the world is responding to climate change. Therefore, the analysis focuses on introducing a formalized and largely replicable approach to the formulation and analysis of hypothesized paths that underline the communication of the state’s national adaptation and utilization of international goals to achieve sustainability. Moreover, the model constructed and implemented in this book is designed to examine how environmental discourses and the norms that underpin them are diffused (or not) across different communicative channels and networks at the national and international levels. At the same time, it may be adapted, modified and improved by researchers to examine the nature of political communication regarding perceptions of environmental ethics, duties and responsibilities, as polities attempt to adapt and reshape in response to the impacts of climate change. While the model is explained in more detail in subsequent chapters, we first turn to an introduction of social diffusion theory and its relation to global governance frameworks such as the UN SDGs, which comprise the theoretical approach.

Note

1 That is, President Trump, who has stated that climate change is a conspiracy created by ‘China’ for a geopolitical competitive advantage. It is likely that other members of the administration have known the reality of climate change for many years. For example, it was discovered following an investigation by InsideClimate News, that Exxon-Mobil had known about climate change since the late 1970s, having conducted its own empirical research, but nonetheless proceeded to invest heavily in think tanks to spread doubt about the advance of climate change (Banerjee et al. 16 September 2015). As Klein (2017: 67) states, the reality of climate change was known long before the current Secretary of State, Rex Tillerson, became the company’s CEO.

2 Social diffusion of the sustainability discourse

As argued in the previous chapter, the strategic aim of the Paris Agreement and the SDGs is to regulate state and business conduct such that they become more sustainable. However, although the SDGs are organized and pioneered by the UN, a global framework of governance, it is to a large extent the responsibility of the state to regulate the conduct of private businesses and citizens of a country to correspond with UN frameworks of governance. Further, as stated, the Paris Agreement contains very little by way of obligating the state. Rather, the emphasis is on ‘responsibilizing’ through methods of socialization by, for instance, tying the norm of environmentalism to notions of prestige, status and honour within the international community. This, indeed, has been argued to be the case for China, whose drive to ‘go green’, by financing green industries and dominating burgeoning renewables markets, is beneficial to the state’s international image as it constitutes a value that may be used to legitimate Chinese regional and international leadership in a similar way to G7 nations heralding the norms of ‘freedom’ and ‘democracy’ on the international stage (LaForgia 2017; Pope 13 January 2018). Additionally, notions of prestige have influenced Japanese international relations also, particularly in the context of increasing state influence over international politics as its economic size shrinks relative to rising powers in the international system (Dobson 2017; Hatoyama 2017; Stockwin and Ampiah 2017).

State approaches to regulating the conduct of businesses, civil society and citizens have been the subject of considerable debate within the academic literature. For example, there are claims that, whether due to the rise of individualism as the pervading cultural component of postmodernity or the emergence of fluid ‘networked’ social structures transforming our economic system based upon revolutionary technological advancements, the result of globalization is that the state may wither away entirely (Giddens 1991; Beck and Beck-Gernsheim 2002; Castells 2009). Conversely, others claim that the state has indeed transformed but to the effect of strengthening its political power through a sophisticated process of delegating responsibility (but not altogether transferring it) and offsetting accountability onto epistemic specialist groups, the market, society or the individual (Burnham 2001; Stoker 2002; Hay 2007). For the latter at least, as Jonathan Joseph (2012: 131) states, the view is that this ‘does not replace hierarchical state power, but supplements it and offers new, subtler techniques that regulate from a distance’. This governmental approach is to encourage certain kinds of conduct among social actors, often the individual but also businesses and those actors that ostensibly comprise civil society.¹

This ‘governing from a distance’ is reflected in the analysis over the communication of risk and responsibility between the state, market and citizen in Japan. Van der Does-Ishikawa and Hook (2017), focusing on media discourses surrounding the transborder issue of atmospheric pollution in Japan, demonstrate how the state off-loads the associated risks and potential harms to subnational political bodies, the market and to citizens. Through this process, they argue, the locus of responsibility to implement adaptation strategies to certain risks domestically has been shifting from the state to these other stakeholders through a ‘gradual, covert persuasion communicated through the media’ (van der Does-Ishikawa and Hook 2017: 103).

For China, ‘governance from a distance’ may be observed in how media regulation has been forced to adapt to the technological and economic changes that would have brought about an extensive diversification of media sources which challenge political control of media content. While this may have been argued to be conducive to the ‘fluidization’ of social structures as noted above, Chinese state regulation has been largely successful in militating against the market liberalization of media content. However, this has been carried out through a variety of means and effectuated numerous changes in the media landscape. For example, we have witnessed the emergence of newspapers focused on economic markets, particularly in major cities such as Beijing, Guangdong and Shanghai, reflecting a partial diversification of content, as well as the widespread engagement in political propaganda and indoctrination chiefly carried out by businesses that are state-owned or companies that are managed by the state (Kudō 2015; Yu 2017). Further, online media content has been managed by placing restrictions on private companies, supporting stated-managed or owned online news companies and content and other policies that have meant that news sources are highly concentrated, particularly in major cities, towards state-managed content to an extent that exceeds that of democratic countries (Yu 2017). This reflects two relatively different sets and possibly extents of challenges faced by both states respectively in effectively communicating environmental norms to businesses and citizens.

For this reason, we argue that with the metrics and directives for setting out a global agenda established, the state, ‘responsibilized’ by multilateral frameworks geared towards effectuating a global response to a transborder issue such as climate change, is behoved to communicate the ideal of sustainable development to different stakeholders such as citizens and businesses. However, owing to the differences in terms of structure and control between the state and the media, there are differing domains and ex...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of illustrations
• Introduction
• 1 The growing sustainability discourse
• 2 Social diffusion of the sustainability discourse
• 3 Current developments towards renewable energy
• 4 Development of clean energy in China and Japan
• 5 Translation of sustainability
• 6 Multi-sectoral interaction for social diffusion of SDGs
• 7 Corpus research methodologies
• 8 Sustainable living discourse in China
• 9 Diffusion of sustainable living discourse in China and Japan
• Conclusion
• Appendix 1
• Appendix 2
• References
• Index