Pursuing urban sustainability through policy experimentations? Insights from the pay-as-you-throw experiment in China

Abstract

Drawing on political economy literature at the nexus of urban entrepreneurialism and policy experimentation, this paper explores how policy experiments are purposely used to stage the restructuring of urban sustainability and what entrepreneurial urban experiments function in actual. This article focuses on the case of a local experimental policy, “pay-as-you-throw,” to show how urban experiments employed by the entrepreneurial municipality are not always a silver bullet, and their effectiveness is conditional. We demonstrate that entrepreneurial local governments’ efforts to enhance urban sustainability were undermined by three combined factors in the government-led approach to urban experiments: the false delegation of experimental discretion, routinized implementation of experiments, and positive selection of pilot sites.