This article critically examines the 10th China Flower Expo as an emblematic case of green state entrepreneurialism in practice. Promoted as a flagship ecological event to advance Chongming Island’s transformation into a “world-class ecological island,” the Expo ultimately functioned less as a vehicle for sustainability transition than as a staged performance of green legitimacy, punctuated by short-term accumulation and long-term deferral. Drawing on extensive fieldwork and an integrated analytical framework that combines green state entrepreneurialism, strategic inaction, and urban political ecology, this study unpacks how ecological discourses are mobilized through mega-events to attract investment, restructure space, and consolidate state authority—while deferring substantive socio-ecological transformation. We argue that the post-Expo stagnation does not simply reflect implementation failure or greenwashing but reveals a deeper logic of risk-averse environmental statecraft. Through symbolic compliance and selective follow-through, the local state maintained the appearance of green commitment while avoiding structural changes. By foregrounding the role of strategic inaction as a mode of governance, this article contributes to critical debates on authoritarian environmentalism and urban sustainability transitions. It highlights how green entrepreneurialism, far from overcoming ecological crises, may entrench uneven socio-environmental outcomes and reproduce the contradictions it claims to resolve.

China's ongoing transition to a modern urban-centered economy is accompanied by ambitions of sustained economic growth as well as promises of environmentally sustainable futures for its cities. In this paper we critically assess how these two ideas are combined and translated into realities on the ground by examining three low-carbon development projects in Shanghai: Anting New Town, Dongtan Eco-City, and Hongqiao CBD's low-carbon transportation hub. By mobilizing insights from the academic field of Sustainability Transitions – specifically on expectations, experimentation and innovation journeys – we show how the original plans derailed and why until now there has been limited success in living up to the promises of sustainability. To realize the promises more fully in future projects we identify three broad lessons for the actors involved: they should nurture a set of parallel pathways, foster a more experimentalist mindset, and learn to embrace uncertainty.

Currently little is known about how institutional arrangements co-evolve with urban experimentation. This paper mobilizes neo-institutional literature and recent urban experimentation literature as a framework to explore how and why institutional arrangements differ across urban contexts. Empirically the paper focusses on smart city initiatives in Amsterdam, Hamburg and Ningbo. These three cities are frontrunners in adopting a comprehensive smart city agenda, but they do so in different ways. The paper examines regulative, normative and cognitive elements of institutional arrangements, explores how they shape experimentation, and reflects on their place-based specificities. The comparative analysis suggests that the focus of, and approach to, experimentation can be understood as resting in a (possibly unique) combination of strategic agency and dynamics at multiple spatial scales.