Transnational Policy Advocacy and Authoritarianism
Global advocacy tactics, mechanisms and targets are changing. What strategies are proving effective with the ascendancy of South-South development? International actors, NGOs, enterprises, communities and states interact in strategic ways to promote sustainable global development.
Greening Global China (with Hui Li)
How do nongovernmental organizations shape the environmental practices of powerful actors? A body of research and practice has identified combinations of advocacy strategies and policy opportunities that effectively drove policy change in the latter half of the 20th century and primarily in the context of Western liberal democracies and the international institutions they led. Emerging scholarship, however, indicates that the standard policy advocacy toolkit is no longer able to win policy gains in a changing global order, and China scholars have long known that effective policy advocacy in authoritarian regimes takes a very different form. With the rise of South-South development, Chinese projects, enterprises and financers increasingly shape the development trajectory of countries across the Global South, but face increasing challenges and pushback with respect to the environmental and social impacts of these projects.
With its immense domestic environmental impact, growing global footprint through the Belt and Road Initiative, and power to influence environmental standards and practices across the global South, identifying effective ways to green China’s global engagement is critical. This study examines how international NGOs are greening China’s overseas aid and investment. It draws on findings from over a hundred interviews with diverse stakeholders in ‘Global China’ and its environmental impacts, including international NGOs, Chinese NGOs, enterprises, government officials and government officials and NGOs in countries that host Chinese overseas projects. To zoom in on how these diverse actors collaborate and contest to shape the greening of Global China, it also includes in-country political ethnography in Turkey, Indonesia, and Cambodia. Findings shed light on how policy change is evolving in a shifting global landscape characterized by growing authoritarianism, multipolarity and challenges to established international norms and institutions.
Under review.