Carbon fee and climate governance delayism in Taiwan

After three unsuccessful attempts to implement an energy tax, Taiwan introduced a carbon fee system through an amendment to the Greenhouse Gas Reduction and Management Act at the end of 2020, opening a fourth window of opportunity for carbon pricing. However, this limited carbon fee illustrates that Taiwan has taken only a tiny step forward in climate governance and highlights its lock-in, high-carbon economic path. This seems infeasible without the exogenous pressure of the European Union’s Carbon Boundary Adjustment Mechanism. Compared with East Asia’s carbon-intensive industries in Korea, China, and Japan, Taiwan lags significantly in promoting carbon pricing. This study focuses on Taiwan’s carbon fee decision-making mechanisms, democratic processes, and structural constraints within a high-carbon economy as viewed through developmental environmentalism in the East Asian climate governance literature. This study further explores how the predicament of green transformation in high-carbon-emitting developing countries takes shape, including their climate policies, value, and industrial path dependence, and especially their authoritarian and recentralized bureaucratic decision-making mode, to explain the delay in the transformation. By examining Taiwan’s initial carbon fee decision-making, this study attempts to reinterpret developmental environmentalism, shedding light on the structural predicament arising from the internationally compulsory green transformation faced by all high-carbon-emitting manufacturing countries in Asia and globally.