SIGNATURE WORK
CONFERENCE & EXHIBITION 2023

In 2009, China committed to reduce its carbon dioxide emissions by 40-45% by 2020 compared to 2005 levels. After one year, the National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC) launched the low-carbon city pilot policy (LCCP) , which included both production and consumption to maintain sustainable development and a balanced city ecosystem. Previous studies have shown low carbon city’s great prospective in reducing China’s carbon dioxide emissions, but there is a lack of discussion from a policy analysis perspective about the similarities and differences among cities’/provinces’ plans, and the driving factors behind them. Moreover, it is unclear how cities can improve their policy and learn from each other. In response, this paper identified how different city governments have different focus on their plans, thus showing the characteristics of bottom-up planning in low-carbon cities, and better utilized them to understand the reasons for decision-making at the local level. In this study, 11 policy documents from 7 cities in the second batch were collected and analyzed using a revised qualitative code book in NVivo (2014). It’s found that energy and manufacturing industry are the popular themes mentioned in the plan and governments like using supporting measures to ensure the implementation. However, there’s still lack of communications between cities in developing their plans.