This research explores the mechanisms through which farmers in contemporary China might stage successful environmental protests by studying the Huazhen Incident. The author argues that the Huazhen farmers' success in forcing the local government to close the heavily-polluting industrial park can be accounted for by their having successfully aligned an anti-pollution frame with an anti-corruption one, employing the formal village social organizations as mobilizing structures, and creatively developing opportunities for group participation by senior villagers. These three processes empowered Huazhen farmers and constrained the repressive power of the local state as follows: First, environmental issues in Huazhen were entangled with various other social problems. Issue entrepreneurs effectively integrated farmers' multiple grievances through bridging the anti-pollution and anti-corruption frames. Secondly, Huazhen farmers creatively used formal village social organizations as mobilizing structures. By embedding a village-wide mobilization of anti-pollution protest into the village committee election process and by employing the Society of Senior Villagers to mobilize the elderly, the Huazhen protest enjoyed the support of the majority of villagers, as well as the main force of the senior villagers necessary for a breakthrough. Thirdly, farmers in Huazhen both employed existing opportunities and developed new ones, making full use of the formalistic opportunities provided by the local government. Most importantly, the farmers in Huazhen strategically explored the group-specific opportunities of the elderly for constraining state power through the weapons of the weak. During the early stages of the protest, the power of the weak forced the local government to appeal to emotion work instead of repression in order to demobilize the protesters. While officials were doing this, the elderly were protesting with a strategic dramaturgy of moderate extremism, which served to further mobilize the farmers and garner support from the general public. Confronting the moderate but persistent protests of the elderly, the local government switched to repression. Excessive repression, however, failed to control the protests. Worse still, such repression gave farmers the moral high ground. Farmers in Huazhen utilized the protest spectacle as an alternative media and turned the protest base into a direct theatre, broadcasting their protest and sensitizing the public by making them bear witness to state oppression, thereby deconstructing the official discourse of the repression. The protest of farmers in Huazhen ultimately triggered intervention from higher-level authorities, which forced the local state to make a full concession: closing the entire industrial park. / 鄧燕華. / Adviser: Lianjiang Li. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 73-01, Section: A, page: . / Thesis (Ph.D.)--Chinese University of Hong Kong, 2010. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 175-190). / Electronic reproduction. Hong Kong : Chinese University of Hong Kong, [2012] System requirements: Adobe Acrobat Reader. Available via World Wide Web. / Electronic reproduction. [Ann Arbor, MI] : ProQuest Information and Learning, [201-] System requirements: Adobe Acrobat Reader. Available via World Wide Web. / Abstracts in Chinese and English. / Deng Yanhua.

In the first essay of this dissertation, I argue that much of the observed variation in national climate change mitigation levels can be explained by a combination of national interests and the strategic constraints of the collective action problem. Specifically, the interactions between state costs and benefits and state size, a proxy for invulnerability to free-riding, strongly predict observed variation in national yearly emissions. I derive this hypothesis and connect it to extant literature with a theoretical framework that interrelates state climate change mitigation interests, preferences, behaviors, and outcomes. I test the hypothesis by predicting the difference between real emissions changes and a novel estimate for counterfactual emissions changes. The theoretical framework and the counterfactual estimation methodology developed in this paper will facilitate future work on climate mitigation politics, from both international and domestic politics approaches. In the second essay, I analyze the design of major climate change mitigation treaties, and outline how reliance on collective reciprocity undermines their ability to enforce participation and compliance. Collective reciprocity is limited in its ability to induce high cost actions among large numbers of states. I demonstrate this challenge with an empirical approach that first estimates treaty participation and then estimates compliance by comparing signatory emissions to a synthetic control that weights for both treatment propensity and pre-treatment trends. I find no evidence of success in climate treaties thus far, underlining the tensions in collective reciprocity designs and indicating the need for an alternative approach. In the third essay, I develop a novel institutional theory of long-term environmental good provision, particularly forest conservation. Long-term goods, or those for which payoffs are delayed or spread over time, are more likely to be provided by states with long-term institutions, or those with low discount rates and inter-temporal commitment mechanisms. Leveraging recent institutional theories, I argue that party institutionalization lengthens institutional time horizons while constraints on the executive allows inter-temporal commitment. Both features therefore predict long-term environmental good provision. Environmental goods are frequently long term because feedback from ecological systems creates tipping points or vicious cycles, meaning that current actions may be costless today but contribute to significant damage in future periods. Understanding the implications of the inter-temporal nature of many environmental goods is especially important because a large share of environmental goods, such as forest conservation, are not explained by traditional approaches which focus on public goods models for symmetric and non-excludable goods. I test my theory with cross-national time-series data on forest coverage, demonstrating that forest protection is not predicted by public goods theory but is well predicted by long-term institutions.