Multilateral environmental engagement with Chinese characteristics: an economic nationalism perspective

Since Deng Xiaoping’s introduction of liberal market reforms in the late 1970s, expanding the economy has become a vital component of the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) capacity to maintain domestic social order and stability. In support of rapid development, China’s national economic fortunes have been linked with the global economic system. As a result, overall human security has benefited, delivering widespread prosperity and social mobility to many and lifting millions of individuals out of poverty. Perhaps in contradiction, Chinese authorities have forcefully guarded sovereign domain over domestic and international relations, and have frequently been reluctant to cooperate on other global affairs, like mitigating transnational ecological degradation. Substantively, China has obstructed coordination on nationalturned-international concerns like climate change and ozone depletion due to prospective imposed compliance costs which may limit economic growth and challenge the CCP’s ability as the primary provider of social prosperity. Also, China has feared external regulations and scrutiny encroaching upon its national sovereignty. Contemporarily, however, declaratory policies and behaviour has changed, with China becoming an increasingly willing and active participant in Multilateral Environmental Agreements (MEAs) and global regimes, responding to particular issues like climate change and ozone depletion. The purpose of this chapter is to understand why the sovereign-centric China, through its foreign relations, has become more open to multilateral engagement on global environmental issues. Specifically serving as China’s most visible forms of engagement and multilateralism are its participation in the environmental redistributive funding mechanisms confronting climate change and ozone layer depletion, the Global Environmental Facility (GEF ) for the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), and the Multilateral Fund (MLF ) for the Montreal Protocol on Substances That Deplete the Ozone Layer (hereafter the Montreal Protocol). China’s interactions with these funding mechanisms are examined here as foreign policy case studies to comprehend China’s international environmental cooperation. The pressing questions are as follows: 1 Why does Chinese foreign policy engage in environmental multilateralism? 2 In what way has Chinese foreign policy (re)framed global environmental issues and specifically climate change and ozone depletion?

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