Proposal of the System of Governance, Innovation, Cultural Construction and Lifestyle: Towards a Green and Low-Carbon Society

Existing widely used governance strategies often emphasize agency of individual consumers, with stakeholders such as the government, businesses, the media, and social organizations. All strategies aim to guide consumers, with the ultimate goal of changing consumption behavior by altering consumers' attitudes, perceptions, and consumption habits. This kind of governance strategy, however, overlooks that consumer decisions are social and collective products and are constrained by structural factors. This paper proposes a governance system emphasizing systematic and structural dynamics, mobilizing practices by multiple stakeholders including the government, businesses, research institutions, the media, social organizations, and consumers. By activating the structural dynamic system composed of social governance, social innovation, social culture construction, and social lifestyle, the GICL governance system aims to promote high-quality development of the entire system through the advancement of green and low-carbon consumption. The system configuration emphasizes active participation of multiple stakeholders as well as collaboration of multiple practices. Thus, the GICL system is different from existing governance systems which are either consumer-centered ones that aim to change consumer behavior to achieve green consumption of the society, or government-led ones where the government is in dominant position and all other stakeholders can only be mobilized or instructed by government policies. This system, therefore, has strong empirical and applicable features, capable of engaging in dialogue with the existing low-carbon consumption governance concepts and systems, and helps to promote continuous improvement of China's low-carbon consumption governance system.