From Theory to Practice: Changing Conceptions of Hegemony to Hegemony Analysis in Environmental Governance

Abstract

This paper illustrates the theoretical development of ‘hegemony’, which emerged as a slogan during the Russian Social-Democratic movement from the late 1890s, then informed by Antonio Gramsci’s theory, and later critically developed by Robert Cox from the dimension of international relation, and reconceptualized by Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe with discourse analysis, and recently broadened by David Levy to environmental governance domain. Since environmental issue has been a new threat to hegemony, the paper focuses on the practical perspective sensitive to the context of China, and discusses changes of hegemony among government, corporation and non-governmental organization (NGO) in the development of environmental governance in China. With the social contexts of development in China after the establishment of the New China in 1949, based on a timeline, it concludes that the feature of hegemony in the development of China’s environmental governance has changed from highly prescriptive planning in the planned economy period to government supervision in the market economy period, then towards tripartite cooperation recently.