East Asia’s Sustainability Challenge

Since the 1960s, developing Asia has been going through a historically unprecedented process of urbanization and industrialization. This process, which began in East Asia with Japan after World War II (Johnson 1982), then spread first to Korea (Amsden 1989; Rock 1992; Westphal 1978), Taiwan Province of China (Wade 1990), Hong Kong, China (Haggard 1990), and Singapore (Huff 1999) and subsequently to Indonesia (Hill 1996), Malaysia (Jomo 2001), Thailand (Pongpaichit 1980; Rock 1994), and China has spawned enormous interest. While most of the debate surrounding the East Asian development experience has centered on the proximate causes of its development trajectory and the economic and political consequences of this trajectory for the East Asian newly industrializing economies (NIEs), because Asia looms so large in the global economy and ecology, interest has belatedly turned to the environmental consequences of East Asia’s development path and to the political economy of governmental responses to deteriorating environmental conditions in the region (Brandon and Ramankutty 1993; Rock 2002a). The focus on the environment came none too soon. Rapid urbanization, industrialization, and globalization in the East Asian NIEs, when combined with ‘grow first, clean up later’ environmental policies, have resulted in average levels of air particulates approximately five times higher than in OECD countries and twice the world average (Asian Development Bank 1997). Not surprisingly, of the 60 developing country cities on which the World Bank (2004: 164–5) reports urban air quality, 62% (10 of 16) are in developing East Asia, all but one of the rest are in South Asia. Measures of water pollution in East Asia, such as biological oxygen demand (BOD) and levels of suspended solids are also substantially above world averages (Lohani 1998). With the prospect for further rapid urban-industrial growth rooted in the attraction of foreign direct investment and the export of manufactures in East Asia, the rest of Asia, and the rest of the developing world as the East Asian ‘model of development’ spreads, local, regional, and global environmental conditions may well get worse before they get better (Rock et al. 2000). At the core of this environmental challenge in East Asia is rapid urban industrial growth.