Paper Titles & Abstracts

The EU is one of the leading players in designing global rules and shaping global institutions in international environmental governance. Chinese policymakers see the EU as an important partner and have a genuine wish to learn from EU experience in environmental governance. The EU's role as a normative power raises the debate on how far its cooperation with China in the field of environment has facilitated the diffusion of EU environmental governance norms in China. In this paper, the author aims to answer why some environmental governance norms have diffused more successfully than others in China. The author argues that norms diffuse when normative interests and utility interests are mutually supportive and reinforce each other. Diffusion fails when normative interests and utility interests are in conflict. The diffused norms, which are dynamic and contingent, are adjusted to fit China's domestic beliefs and practices. The meaning of these norms is subject to complex processes of re-interpretation and re-negotiation. China, instead of being a passive norm receiver, is actively engaged in projecting its own normative preferences in global environmental governance. While the EU actively promotes its norms in China, structural and institutional factors constrain its normative power.