Think big and small : who is better at financing a green future?

Abstract

This thesis was an attempted to decipher and contextualize the evolution of the Chinese green finance policy domain from 1995 to 2021. By constructing a customized analytical toolkit incorporating both temporal and institutional axis, upstream and downstream venues, the thesis traced epistemic debates from both scholars and politicians, institutional arrangements, other reputable materials from government websites, and complemented with a Contentanalysis of 51 cases from the Green Finance Pilot Zones (2017-2020). This thesis found that the green finance policy domain was predominantly constructed by the macroeconomic policy domain and only recently leaned toward the environmental one. Moreover, the found coherence between upstream vision and downstream practice was a result of both implicit guidance by the state and spontaneous participation by the locals. This explorative analysis provided rewarding insights and hence this thesis advocates a policy domain approach for future research agenda.