NGOs as policy entrepreneurs: transnational advocacy and policy influence in greening the Belt and Road Initiative
Year: 2025
Type: article
Abstract: China’s massive Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) has raised significant concerns about its environmental impact. Greening the BRI is a complex process that operates at various levels and involves diverse actors. However, existing research has primarily focused on state and corporate actors, while giving limited attention to non-state actors such as NGOs. This paper examines how international NGOs (INGOs) and Chinese government-organized NGOs (GONGOs) influence BRI environmental governance as collaborating policy entrepreneurs. Drawing on 76 in-depth interviews and the literature on transnational advocacy and policy entrepreneurship, we develop a framework identifying three modular advocacy mechanisms: aggregating/messaging, exchanging/framing, and mobilizing/balancing. We show that coordination across these mechanisms is critical for policy influence. The Traffic Light System case illustrates successful policy uptake through integrated advocacy, while the Jakarta-Bandung high-speed railway project reveals the limits of fragmented engagement. Our study contributes a new conceptual lens for understanding how NGOs shape environmental governance under authoritarian practices and highlights the role of semi-state actors such as GONGOs in brokering transnational norm translation.
Source: Journal of Chinese Governance
Institutions: University of Hong Kong, University of San Diego
Language: English
Topic: Belt and Road Initiative
Subfield: Economics and Econometrics
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: hybrid
OpenAlex ID: W4413214349