NGO Advocacy Strategies and the Greening of Global China

• In Event: China and Climate Change Politics

Abstract

NGOs often use insider and outsider advocacy strategies to lobby the government and shape the policy environment. Research on environmental advocacy has focused on its impacts on national or international environmental policy, such as high-level climate negotiations or environmental policy adoption by transnational institutions (Rietig 2011; Fox and Brown 1998). A few studies have examined environmental advocacy in authoritarian contexts, where states might operate according to different incentive structures, and effective advocacy may take different forms (Li et al. 2017; Farid 2019). But no studies thus far, to our knowledge, have examined transnational advocacy strategies targeting an authoritarian regulatory regime’s global activities. In this study, we examine international NGOs’ efforts to promote environmental governance within the context of China’s outbound activities, a largely state-directed project by an authoritarian party-state. Drawing on transnational advocacy, social movement, and interest group literature, we examine how domestic and global political opportunity structures and organizational factors, such as regulations, INGO forms, norms, and reputation, combine to affect their use of insider and outsider advocacy strategies. A fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA) is used to analyze 42 INGOs’ efforts to greening global China, and several combinations of causally relevant factors that lead to their varying use of advocacy strategies are identified. Our findings highlight how global civil society actors navigate the complex political and organizational environment as they seek to shape responsible environmental behavior of an increasingly globalized China.

Authors

• May Farid, University of San Diego

• Hui Li, University of Hong Kong