Most governments around the world – whether democracies or autocracies – face at least some pressure to respond to citizen concerns on some social problems. But the issues that capture public attention — the ones on which states have incentives to be responsive – aren’t always the issues on which bureaucracies, agents of the state, have the ability to solve problems. What do these public agencies do when citizens’ demands don’t line up with either the supply of state capacity or the incentives of the central state?

Our guest, Dr. Iza Ding, an Associate Professor of Political Science at Northwestern University, examines one way in which bureaucrats try to square this circle. In her recent book The Performative State: Public Scrutiny and Environmental Governance in China, Iza argues that state actors who need to respond but lack substantive capacity can instead choose to perform governance for public audiences. 

Iza explores the puzzling case of China’s Environmental Protection Bureau or the EPB, a bureaucratic agency set up to regulate polluting companies. This issue of polluted air became a national crisis during the 2008 Beijing Summer Olympics when athletes were struggling to breathe let alone compete. Since then, Chinese citizens have been directing their pollution-related complaints to the EPB, which Iza found, has been given little power by the state to impose fines or shut down polluting factories.
But that doesn’t mean the civil servants working in this agency do nothing. Instead, Iza documents how and why they routinely deploy symbols, language, and theatrical gestures of good governance to give the appearance of dynamic action – all while leaving many environmental problems utterly unaddressed.

We talk with Iza about how she uncovered these performative dynamics through months of ethnographic research in which she was embedded within a Chinese environmental protection agency. She also tells us about how she tested her claims using original media and public opinion data. Finally, we talk about how her findings about performative governance in the environmental space translates to China’s COVID-19 response.


Works cited in this episode:

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