Paper Titles & Abstracts

Since the 1990s the concept of environmental diplomacy has gained significant scholarly attention. Particularly interesting is the incorporation of a bottom-up approach, the participation of non-governmental organisations (NGOs) and civil society, in the traditional top-down perspectives on diplomacy. A study on the interaction between a mature civic society in countries of the European Union (EU) and an emerging one in People's Republic of China (PRC) is especially fascinating in the realm of environmental politics. The PRC government launches green policies and the EU is usually associated with high environmental standards. Chinese NGO's regularly expose environmental scandals in China, just like their well established and institutionalised counterparts in Europe. This case study will examine the protest of Chinese NGO's against a waste incinerator project by the German state development bank KfW Bankengruppe in Beijing. Discourse analysis is employed to investigate the people-to-people dialogue in environmental diplomacy between China and the EU heavyweight Germany. The research will focus on the question of how the Chinese environmental NGOs and the KfW bank address or avoid environmental diplomacy in this dispute. The research will illustrate the strategies and the rationales used by the Chinese NGO's and the German state bank. It will offer interesting insights in the exchanges between Chinese NGOs and German NGOs and question the implication for a sustainable dialogue mechanism for EU-China environmental diplomacy.