This chapter explores how China’s authoritarian underpinnings may affect the trajectory of its environmental regulation. It examines whether rising environmental consciousness and a shift in social and economic norms will push China towards an era of greener growth, even if institutions take time to catch up. It then assesses how the regime’s current preference for a flexible, adaptive mode of governance will impact the future of pollution control. Will this spur on a process of “coevolution,” where local policy experimentation eventually produces an unexpected but effective set of institutions that can enforce sustainable solutions to pollution? Or will the regime’s deep-rooted principal–agent problems – combined with the bureaucracy’s growing wariness of experimentation – drive the leadership towards a pervasive “short-termism” in environmental governance?