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East Asia suffered 35% of the global burden of mortality from ambient (outdoor) air pollution in 2015, a higher proportion than in any other region.1 Air pollution in East Asia is not only a major health risk; it also has damaging impacts on the environment, which leads to significant economic and social consequences, dampening economic growth and reducing welfare. Although existing laws and policies have made progress in alleviating air pollution in individual East Asian countries, the protection of vulnerable ecosystems and human environments, together with the resolution of transboundary air pollution problems, has only recently become major targets of regional cooperation.
In common with other complex societal challenges—for example, climate change, genetically modified organisms (GMOs), chemical pollution, avian flu, or bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE)—air pollution was initially regarded as a simple environmental problem. Over time, however, perceptions of these issues changed, and they are now seen as hybrid challenges characterized by scientific uncertainty, invisibility, and transboundary risks. Changing perceptions have, in turn, facilitated a paradigm shift in environmental research. The shifting research paradigm has evolved to embrace a trend toward interdisciplinarity in tackling the challenges studied by environmental sociology (Chou, 2015).2 Researchers who investigate air pollution and other environmental problems characterized by technological disputes and uncertainty increasingly emphasize interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary integration of research findings (Gross and Heinrichs, 2010). Their research is also increasingly viewed in the context of the risk society and risk governance (Sellke and Renn, 2010).
Social scientists have investigated the processes by which scientific knowledge about air pollution is produced and the contested construction of air pollution risk. Writing on the subject of the risk society, Beck (1986) argued for the emancipation of technology from science and a return to the sort of scientific autonomy envisaged by the Age of Enlightenment. Such an autonomous science would be unencumbered by the interference and deformation introduced by political decision-making. Jasanoff (1990) and Fischer (2000) also emphasized the importance of scientific knowledge in framing environmental regulations, politics and advocacy, as well as the types of scientific knowledge generated by epistemic communities. The intrusion of science into these areas has generated contested discourse among environmental activists, civil society groups, and policymakers.
Lidskog et al. (2010) proposed different research approaches to the analysis of expertise and technocracy. These authors focused on how experts face up to public challenges, how scientific and local knowledge are produced, and the democratization of expertise. Nowotny (2003) described the deployment of socially robust knowledge to challenge the expertise of mainstream scientists, and Ottinger (2010) examined how civil society can produce scientific knowledge that challenges official scientific discourse or the scientific data released by polluters.
The management of air pollution is now entangled with these issues of contested expertise and competing scientific narratives, and management is further complicated by transboundary risks. On the one hand, the analysis of transboundary risks represents an emerging approach to air pollution risk governance. On the other hand, transboundary air pollution risks can no longer be investigated at the level of individual nations and need to be analyzed in the context of global or regional governance structures (Chou, 2015). Air Pollution Governance in East Asia interrogates the risks posed by transboundary air pollution in the context of four East Asian countries and analyzes cosmopolitan governance of such risks in the context of regional traits, political structures, and socioeconomic problems.
Bulkeley (2005) indicates that transboundary risks represent, in essence, environmental and technological issues that involve several levels of government, span multiple spatial scales, and diffuse across borders. New research methods are therefore needed to incorporate cross-disciplinary and large-scale issues of scientific uncertainty that attend the analysis and perception of issues such as air pollution and climate change in different countries and regions. In light of the tendency of nations to approach these issues idiosyncratically, there is a need to replace methodological nationalism with methodological cosmopolitanism. The vision and structure of social science research, therefore, need to move beyond traditional analyses framed by national norms and attitudes toward more cross-border approaches and a global vision (Beck and Sznaider, 2006; Beck and Grande, 2010). This major paradigm shift in the field of social science research would also have impacts on political and economic critiques of these issues, and on governance research (Chou, 2015).
The research methodology of Air Pollution Governance in East Asia adopts methodological cosmopolitanism to analyze transboundary air pollution risks that affect Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, and China. Within this framework, the contributing authors attempt to understand the characteristics of transboundary air pollution risk encountered by each country. In the chapters that follow, they move beyond the analysis of governance conflicts generated by internal, nation-state political and economic structures to investigate trans-national political, cultural, and geographical affinities that could form the basis of a common governance model.
There are research precedents that support our approach. Chang (1999) coined the concept of “compressed modernity” in their analysis of South Korea’s exponential economic growth. This growth was based on the rapid adoption of Western models of economic development, which led to social imbalances due to the temporal compression of development and the pursuit of growth through technology. As a result, South Korea suffered a series of major economic disasters in the 1990s. Chou (2000, 2002, 2004) also adopted the concept of a “delayed, hidden high-tech risk society” to analyze the accelerated industrialization that Taiwan initiated in response to the threat of global competition. Taiwan aimed to catch up to other regional powers in terms of scientific and technological development, but the absence of scientific analysis of these developments resulted in tremendous hidden technological risks. Delays in governance and regulation only led to even greater social and political risks.
Han and Shim (2010) used the working hypothesis that techno-industrial development pathways adopted by East Asian countries led to them being vulnerable to a common set of socioeconomic and environmental risks. After analyzing large-scale risk and disaster experiences among East Asian countries, Han and Shim concluded that risks may therefore be “regional.” Furthermore, if transboundary air pollution is one of the deficiencies caused by the rush to modernization (Beck and Grande, 2010), it becomes worthwhile to adopt a perspective of “embedding the regional” in order to explore the transboundary characteristics of air pollutions. In particular, transboundary air pollution could be used as a template for the development of cosmopolitan governance among East Asian countries.
Technological elites and authoritarian technocracies in Taiwan, Japan, Korea, and China have dominated science and technological policy decision-making to put their countries on fast-track industrialization. These attributes have led East Asian countries to imitate the techno-industrial developmental models that led to the industrial and, later, socioeconomic modernization of the West.3 This rush for modernization led to relaxed regulations and a laissez-faire approach to technological risks (Chou, 2015).
The literature reviewed above leads to the conclusion that transboundary air pollution is inevitably a cosmopolitan issue (as constructed by Beck, 2002). Furthermore, controversies centered upon the use of technology and its impacts on nation-states have resulted in what a number of researchers refer to as cosmopolitan risk communities (Beck, 1996, 2009; Zhang, 2015). Regardless of whether the risks center on GMOs, BSE, nuclear accidents, or air pollution, these issues constitute transboundary and cross-border threats, and in this regard, the fates of South Korea, Japan, Taiwan, and China are tightly intertwined. In other words, even if these societies already had a certain degree of cosmopolitanization (Beck and Levy, 2013), the risks would have forced them to develop it further. Our goal is to try to understand the extent to which these East Asian societies have experienced cosmopolitanization to date and to investigate the possibility that they have already produced a cosmopolitanization risk collective (Beck and Levy, 2013). We also investigate whether the existence of risk communities among East Asian states could foster the emergence of transnational actors, activities, networks, institutions, or standards in the government or civil society (Grande, 2006). Otherwise, they should be seen as latent cosmopolitan risk communities independent of one another, having to deal with the pressures and regulations of hidden cosmopolitan risk governance in their individual countries. If this were the case, would it result in the isolation, fragmentation, and fragility of risk management within individual countries, with the consequence that their respective governances and civil societies would lack the means to develop truly international cooperation and governance of transboundary issues?
The structures of risk governance that are unique to East Asia must be understood from the perspective of contemporary technocracy and regulatory science. Based on the operational experiences of regulatory science in western industrial countries, Jasanoff (2005) believed that contemporary technological affairs are dominated by technological bureaucracies. Such bureaucracies exert an invisible, sometimes monopolized domination over technological affairs in some countries, a state of affairs that disrupts democratic decision-making and generates substantial disputes. Facing all types of technological risks, modern societies have gradually evolved from being passive victims of technology to being able to provide mature reflections upon and critiques of alternative pathways toward sustainable development (Nowotny et al., 2001). In particular, some societies have developed robust responses to technologically mediated impacts on the environment, ethics, and health, and have deployed socially robust knowledge (SRK) to monitor and challenge questionable actions by governments (Jasanoff, 2003; Nowotny and Leroy, 2009; Delvenne, 2010). During this process, if citizens can break away from their passivity and systematically develop their risk knowledge, then they may grasp the opportunity to break through the monopoly of authoritative politics to shape a technological democracy.
Using the cosmopolitan theoretical framework, Air Pollution Governance in East Asia examines air pollution and risk governance in four East Asian countries: Japan, Taiwan, South Korea, and China. Contributors to this edited work employ perspectives derived from interdisciplinary social sciences, particularly environmental sociology, political science, and STS (Science, Technology and Society) to analyze cases of air pollution in this region. “Air pollution” is not merely a technical problem. It is embedded in complex social-political-economic structures within and among countries. On the one hand, the four East Asian countries considered in this volume have long histories of State Developmentalism, are largely dependent on the brown economy system for growth, have traditions of authoritarian expert politics. These characteristics have delayed meaningful governance of air pollution. On the other hand, because air pollution is a transboundary issue and systemic risk, it requires cosmopolitan risk governance among East Asian countries. Given the fact that governance in these countries takes place within nation-specific political and economic contexts, there exists a dilemma of how cosmopolitan governance can be achieved. Furthermore, scientific uncertainty over the attribution of pollution resulted in China being scapegoated and allowed the other three countries to shrink away from reflecting on their own domestic sources of air pollution from manufacturing, energy-intensive industries, and automobiles.
To sum up, the objectives of Air Pollution Governance in East Asia are as follows: First, we plan to conceptualize and construct East Asian perspectives on air pollution governance by exploring various cases studies in this region, as well as discussing how the existing fossil fuel-based economy can evolve toward a more sustainable, less carbon-intensive one. Second, we aim to characterize the politicization of air pollution in each country and examine how transnational initiatives to monitor air pollutants are hindered by diplomatic tensions over security and other issues between Taiwan, Japan, South Korea, and China. Third, in addition to identifying the victims of air pollution at different scales (e.g., individual, neighborhood, national, international), the macrostructures of the polluters and pollution will also be investigated. Fourth, via case studies, contributors to this volume demonstrate the contested construction of air pollution risk controversies and discuss how the framing, scientific methodologies, and conflicts of interests between different camps hamper risk governance. Finally, we seek to provide suggestions for better governance models for the risks posed by air pollution, using lessons learned from East Asian experiences.
Following the introductory chapter, the book is structured into four parts: “Air Pollution Politics in East Asia,” “Regional and Transboundary Air Politics,” “National Air Pollution Battles,” and “Contested Risk Constructions of Air Pollution.” Part I deals with the politicization of air pollution in Korea and Taiwan. In Chapter 2, Kim and Ku’s chapter explores how particulate ...
