ENVIRONMENTAL STATECRAFT AND CHANGING ENVIRONMENTAL POLITICS: Chengdu's Ecological Preservation and Eco‐development

Abstract This article develops the concept of environmental statecraft to study changing urban environmental politics in China and beyond. Our review of existing conceptions reveals a growing need to account for temporal and geographical complexity. Neoliberal conceptions of eco‐state restructuring are increasingly strained by contemporary geopolitical realignments, while authoritarian frameworks in the Chinese context have tended to overemphasize coercive enforcement and under‐theorize regulatory flexibility and scalar politics. The article advances environmental statecraft as an alternative framework, which situates urban environmental politics within the current conjuncture of environmental geopolitics, protectionism, and state capitalism. We develop the framework by clarifying its sensitivity to historical and geopolitical conjuncture, its attention to multi‐scalar state actions, and its realist focus on the versatile techniques through which state intervention is crafted. Building on Chinese environmental politics, we propose two analytical categories: managerial statecraft, characterized by flexible and diversified instruments under new managerialism; and developmental statecraft, which mobilizes multi‐scalar resources and increasingly prioritizes regional interventions. The case of Chengdu's ‘Park City’ strategy illustrates how environmental statecraft is enacted to reconcile protection and development with an ethos of guaranteeing ecological and economic security.