Through the Policy Mist: The Impact of Institutional and Temporal Policy Flexibility on Local Renewable Energy Policy Uncertainty in China

As global energy transitions accelerate their pace, centralized states like China face a critical institutional dilemma: how can national authorities design flexible policies that accommodate sub-national heterogeneity without generating local implementation uncertainty? This paper investigates the institutional mechanisms through which policy flexibility shapes renewable energy policy uncertainty (REPU) in China, a country undergoing complex socio-technical transformations under authoritarian governance. We first conceptualize policy flexibility as a dual-dimensional institutional dynamic: policy elasticity, referring to spatial adaptation via policy “translation,” and policy changeability, capturing temporal variation through adaptive “transition.” Drawing on 155 central-level policy documents (2005–2023) and articles from 210 local newspapers, we employ quantitative text analysis to operationalize these dimensions and a news-based approach to measure REPU, revealing three key dynamics. First, enhanced policy elasticity reduces REPU, particularly when local officials possess bureaucratic capital through central government experience, highlighting how bureaucratic capital moderates policy interpretation. Second, local renewable energy endowments amplify the effect of policy elasticity on REPU. Third, overall, policy changeability exhibits a U-shaped relationship with REPU. However, the impact of policy changeability on REPU varies by policy type: high levels of changeability in feed-in-tariff (FIT) and market-oriented policies tend to exacerbate REPU, whereas for other policy types, the relationship follows a U-shaped pattern. These findings provide both a theoretical foundation and empirical evidence for emerging economies seeking to decode the institutional interplay between central policy flexibility and local uncertainty during the renewable energy transition.