A/Prof. Fengshi Wu1
1UNSW, Kensington, Australia
Biography:
Fengshi Wu is an Associate Professor in Political Science and International Relations at the School of Social Sciences, University of New South Wales (UNSW), Sydney, Australia. She is a world leading scholar in environmental politics, state-society relations, and global governance with the empirical focus on the Asia Pacific region (esp. East Asia, Southeast Asia, and Central Asia). Her recent research and teaching interests highlights the global transformation of the energy system rapidly accelerated by the challenges and geo-politics of climate change.
A graduate of the University of Maryland and Beijing University, she has been a Visiting Professor at the Harvard-Yenching Institute, Harvard University (2008-2009) and the Sciences Po, Paris (2024). She was elected to be one of the 2004 Graduate Fellows of the American Academy of Political and Social Sciences based on her PhD work which documented transnational activism and policy advocacy in environmental protection and public health. Her academic works have appeared in China Journal, Environmental Politics, VOLUNTAS, China Quarterly, Global Environmental Politics, Journal of Environmental Policy and Planning, Journal of Contemporary China and International Studies Quarterly. She edited the book China’s Global Conquest for Resources (Routledge, 2017) on Chinese overseas investment in and acquisition of natural resources.
Prior to UNSW, she held academic positions at the University of Melbourne, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, and the Chinese University of Hong Kong. She is a recipient of research grants from leading higher education authorities in the United States, Hong Kong SAR, and Singapore. Currently, she is the inaugural Series Editor of Environment and Society in Asia, Amsterdam University Press, an Executive Board of the International Society for Third-Sector Research (ISTR). Since 2023, she has been the Chairperson of AACaPS.
Abstract:
The papers and the comparative discussions generated by the panel will clarify the role of diverse civil society organizations in the worldwide energy transition and climate politics, which will impact the political economy of many developing countries in the coming decades. Furthermore, they will highlight the discrepancies between the existing analytical frameworks based on empirical evidence mostly from (neo)liberal democracies and the political-economic realities in developing societies that often struggle with violent identity politics, religious revival, corruption, and international relations. The panel calls great attention to the knowledge gap in this field and the under-theorization based on comparative analysis from non-West and hybrid polities (i.e., polities with weak democratic institutions) and points out the resilience of fossil fuel politics and potential challenges to liberal democratic ideals and institutions.
The panel particularly points out the lack of climate activism and even the emergence of obstruction to green energy transition and dissemination of climate misinformation by (un)civil society organizations in some developing societies, and the long-term implications of such a pattern. Also, traditional social organisations (e.g., based on identity and faith) evolve along climate politics and start to take up roles in the broad social processes related to climate adaptation, disaster compensation, and energy transition. Panel papers will examine various aspects of climate and energy related sectors in Indonesia, Taiwan, and Brazil, and generate new findings related to (mis)information, faith and religion, corruption, and political reform and democratic consolidation.