As the scientific understanding of the catastrophic effects of global warming deepens, climate change is gradually being accepted as one of the most daunting global governance challenges of our times. Like few other policy areas, global warming as an unambiguously transnational phenomenon highlights the inadequacy of isolated national approaches. Any significant reduction of global greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions will have to be based on a reliable framework of multilateral cooperation that integrates the emerging economies of the developing world. Especially China, as the world's largest carbon emitter, will undoubtedly play a crucial role in any efforts to reduce global GHG emission. China's future policies towards climate change may well be the decisive factor to determine failure or success of international effort to combat climate change. However, attempts to engage China on the topic of emission reductions have so far yielded modest results at best.

Project Objectives

This research endeavor is based on the premise that a more effective engagement of China on climate change will have to based on a comprehensive understanding regarding the internal dynamics of China's climate policy: the interests that drive the evolution of different policies, the domestic actors that compete over influence as well as the mechanisms of decision-making that ultimately lead to policy-formulation. Most academic efforts to analyze China's political behavior and to decipher its underlying strategies concentrate on the observation of policy outputs, treating China's policy-making system as a monolithic actor. In order to produce a comprehensive picture of Chinese policy-making, it is necessary to supplement the output-oriented assessments with in-depth examinations of underlying trends and internal dynamics. Therefore, this project attempts to provide an interpretation of China's climate policy based on the disaggregation of the proverbial “black box”, focusing on the actors and processes of decision-making rather than just policy outputs. China's policy-making system will be understood as a complex set of different actors, each operating on the basis of its own perceptions and political priorities derived from actor-specific interests. Consequently, policy formulation becomes a product of inter-actor negotiation determined by the distribution influence among different actors.

The policy area of climate change is particularly well suited for an analysis of China's policy-making, not only due to its obvious importance from an international perspective, but also because of the extraordinary dynamic that China's domestic climate policy has developed in recent years. Driven by the growing awareness of China’s special vulnerability against the detrimental impact of climate change, the increasing importance of environmental degradation as a source of social dissatisfaction as well as rising concerns about energy supply security, China's domestic approach to GHG emissions has seen rapid and dramatic changes. With the meteoric rise of climate change to the top of China's political agenda and the formulation of a number of corresponding climate change targets, a great number of domestic actors have rushed into the arena of climate policy-making, competing over bureaucratic turf and influence over the policy-making process. Today, China's climate policy-making has become an intricate and multi-faceted process featuring a multitude of domestic actors with different interests and different methods to pursue these interests. China's domestic and international approach to climate change, its evolution and possible future developments, cannot be understood without a thorough analysis of all of these elements. This project sets out to contribute to this analysis.