Constructing sustainable development : a content analysis of the green policies on the tea industry at Jingmai Mountain region, Yunnan Province, China

Sammanfattning: Sustainable development at the local level is greatly impacted by policymaking. In China’s Jingmai Mountain region, the sustainable development policies are centred mostly around the tea industry, due to the social and environmental dynamics surrounding tea in that region. However, considering the complex interlinkages between the tea industry and local environment and society, the policies concerning the tea sector have many other significant local impacts. In recent years, due to the shift in China’s political focus to ecological civilization, a series of policies on the green development of tea industry were drafted, including the organic transformation of terrace tea gardens and ancient tea forests conservation programs at Jingmai Mountain. Thus, to explore the potentials of the future impact and direction of sustainability in the Jingmai Mountain region, the “sustainable” and “developmental” factors, as conveyed in the sustainable development policies, need to be examined. This thesis examines local policies on sustainability, green economy, and development in detail, through content analysis of policy documents, supplemented with semi-structured interviews. By using sustainable development theories to analyse environmental and developmental factors, measurements, and indications of current policies, this thesis presents the political imagination of the research site, and the potential impact on future development. As the analysis in this thesis shows, the policies aim to achieve local sustainability via a set of fundamental plans for tea industry regarding its infrastructure, regulation, standardization, marketing, and branding, and also for tea-related industries. I found that the policies are environment-oriented ways of boosting the economy; their aim is to balance sustainability and the needs for future social development, and also to integrate the development of other tea-related industries, considering culture and tradition as social resources in building the economy. During the design of ‘local sustainability’, governmental bodies from multiple levels are dominating most procedures, but it is focused on short-term targets without adequate consideration and agenda for the long-term transition. More research is needed to investigate the local sustainable development policies and practices at Jingmai Mountain region, in particularly landscape ecology, anthropology, and sustainability science. The integration of participatory approaches could foster the local sustainability design and actions, considering it can get transdisciplinary and multi-level perspectives involved. This would lead to improvement of the sustainability of policymaking and sustainability practices among collaborators.