Proxy Advocacy: How INGOs Are Greening Global China from Behind the Scenes

• In Event: Civil Society, the State, and Economic Elites: Exploring Relational Dynamics

Abstract

Environmental crises constitute a key challenge of our time, and the greatest obstacles to their resolution are not technological, but political. Researchers and environmentalists thus seek to identify the most effective ways to get decision makers to adopt environmental policies, often contrasting insider versus outsider advocacy tactics. Advocacy tactics have largely been studied in the context of democratic governing systems relatively responsive to public pressure. However, authoritarian practices and systems represent a growing share of the global political landscape. Authoritarian governments are also responsible for a significant proportion of global environmental degradation. What advocacy strategies are used effectively in the context of these systems? We study International NGOs efforts to promote global environmental governance within the context of China’s growing and environmentally impactful overseas activities. China stands to have an outsize impact on the climate crisis both directly, and through its massive investment in countries across the global South. Chinese enterprises build and run roads, stadiums, energy plants, mines, agriculture projects, hospitals, universities, ports and large-scale farms in over 140 countries. China-led multilateral banks and Chinese banks finance projects abroad at levels rivaling the World Bank and IMF, and Chinese experts provide technical training for countries across the global South. The Chinese party-state has been encouraging and backing Chinese actors to participate in ‘going out,’ and many of these overseas activities fall under China’s state-led Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), and its Global Development Initiative (GDI). How do citizen groups, often in the global South, influence environmental policy and practice in striving to green a globalizing authoritarian regime?
As a largely state-directed project, global China and its constitutive actors, including national policymakers, national banks, state-owned enterprises and private firms, do not respond to the same degree or in the same ways to traditional forms of environmental advocacy. Drawing on seventy-six interviews and archival data, we find that INGOs employ both insider and outsider tactic to green global China. While outsider tactics are more limited, they may spur crises—or threats of crises—that create receptivity to insider advocacy. We also argue that as political space for direct advocacy—both insider and outsider tactics—contracts, INGOs increasingly channel their advocacy efforts through proxies, while themselves remaining behind the scenes. Insider advocacy is channeled through state-adjacent institutions with access to the Chinese regulatory system, while outsider tactics are channeled through civil society and communities in host countries of Chinese projects. Our findings highlight new and increasingly sophisticated pathways for advancing global environmental governance, pathways that are increasingly relevant as targets of advocacy become more diffused, resistant to international pressure, and skilled at deploying superficial greenwashing to assuage environmental concerns.

Authors

• May Farid, University of San Diego

• Hui Li, University of Hong Kong