State capacity, blame avoidance and environmental justice in China’s recentralized environmental governance

Conventional wisdom suggests that strong state capacity improves policy implementation and environmental justice while reducing blame politics. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in China, we argue that state capacity can instead redistribute blame and environmental injustice. We conceptualize environmental state capacity and its variation and unevenness by integrating policy outputs and outcomes with three dimensions: administrative, extractive, and coercive. While the clean energy transition project in Hebei exhibited strong capacity across three dimensions, Shanxi’s safe water supply project displayed strong administrative capacity, alongside weak extractive and coercive capacity. We find that different configurations of state capacity shape local officials’ implementation and blame-avoidance strategies by altering their assessment of political risk under authoritarian accountability. Both campaign-style implementation and ‘minimum compliance’ prioritized managing political risk over substantive environmental outcomes and justice, displacing costs onto marginalized rural communities. These displaced costs were followed by public backlash and a new, reactive round of blame politics.