Format/Structure

Paper presentations with PPT images

Long Abstract

Across East Asia, the green economy has become both a fashionable aspiration and a governing imperative. From carbon neutrality pledges to electric vehicle subsidies and urban recycling regimes, “green” circulates as a new common sense—mobilizing markets, moralities, and state interventions. But what does it mean to tax the green? This panel explores how greenness is not only financially costly but also squeezed, instrumentalized, and repurposed to sustain new economic formations, political legitimacy, and ways of knowing and managing the climate crisis.

We examine how East Asian states and industries deploy green as a strategy to extract value, discipline behavior, and frame national futures. In South Korea, electric vehicle infrastructures and green subsidies selectively reshape urban mobility and labor. In China, waste sorting and air pollution control operate as both governance tools and nationalist performance. In Japan and Taiwan, circular economy models celebrate citizen virtue while outsourcing toxic waste to Southeast Asia. Clean water becomes a privatized resource; clean air, a luxury commodity; carbon neutrality, a speculative asset.

Rather than treating green as a universally desirable goal, this panel interrogates how it becomes a terrain of struggle—where ecological urgency is monetized, moralized, and operationalized. We ask: how is “being green” taxed—materially, politically, affectively? Who is squeezed, who profits, and what contradictions emerge? Bringing together ethnographic, historical, and policy-driven research, the panel traces the uneven geographies and epistemologies of East Asia’s green turn. By centering the ambivalence of green dreams and their economic realities, we highlight how climate futures are not just imagined—but extracted, governed, and contested through the taxing of the green.

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