China’s environmental governance has become an increasingly consequential arena in both domestic politics and global governance. At home, the pursuit of its carbon-peaking and carbon-neutrality goals, alongside broader efforts in pollution control, ecological conservation, and green industrial transformation, has generated new forms of central–local coordination, regulatory experimentation, state–business interaction, public participation, and technological governance. Abroad, China’s expanding role in climate diplomacy, green finance, renewable-energy supply chains, overseas infrastructure, and multilateral environmental institutions is reshaping the politics of sustainability far beyond its borders.
This panel brings together research on China’s environmental governance across domestic, transnational, and international scales. Rather than treating these arenas separately, it asks how institutions, actors, and policy processes within China interact with China’s growing environmental footprint and governance role abroad as well as how these domains mutually constitute one another in a changing global system. How do domestic political institutions and implementation structures shape environmental outcomes? What roles do local governments, firms, civil society organisations, experts, and citizens play alongside the central state? How are China’s green transition and industrial policies affecting global markets, development pathways, and environmental standards? Conversely, how do international rules, foreign governments, transnational advocacy, and changing geopolitical conditions feed back into environmental policymaking within China?
The panel welcomes theoretically informed and empirically grounded papers using qualitative, quantitative, or mixed methods. Possible topics include climate and energy policy, green industries, pollution control, environmental regulation and enforcement, central–local relations, public participation and accountability, green industrial policy, carbon markets, biodiversity, environmental justice, green finance, the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), overseas infrastructure, climate diplomacy, transnational regulation, and China’s engagement with the Global South and multilateral institutions.
By connecting domestic governance with global environmental politics, the panel seeks to illuminate how environmental governance is being transformed in an era of geopolitical uncertainty, weakened multilateralism, powerful non-state actors, and contested models of governance and accountability.