Between Chinese and Western Norms: Local Policy Deliberation and Cross-issue-area Variations in China’s Global Governance Strategies

As a rising power, China sometimes plays an ideational leadership role in global governance by constructing homegrown norms and policy ideas, but at other times it embraces Western global governance norms and rules and even imports them for domestic reforms. When will China provide alternative global governance ideas, and when will it learn from the West? This study argues that varied Chinese global governance strategies are produced by varied trajectories of the local policy deliberation mechanism. Local policy deliberation is a pragmatic mechanism of ideational change taking place within local policy communities (i.e., communities of ministry-level bureaucrats and their advisors). Its trajectories are shaped by two conditions. First, uncertainty build-up and problematization of local orthodoxy trigger local ideational change and determine the scope of change. Second, local policy communities’ evaluations of local-idea-informed policy experiments determine the outcome of policy selection. While local policy communities facing uncertainty tend to prioritize local-centric policy innovation, idea importation incentives emerge when the governance performance of such local-centric innovations are perceived as negative. The two conditions can be influenced by multiple factors but are profoundly shaped by policy communities’ interpretations and interests. I illustrate the theory using a comparative case study and process tracing. In the international development cooperation (IDC) case, two rounds of local policy deliberations have focused on absorbing novel local ideas for policy innovation, and local-centric policy experiments were politically endorsed by a passive local policy community. The products were homegrown IDC norms and practices. In the climate case, although local policy deliberation initially brought in local ideas (i.e., the command and control measure), the governance performance of local-centric policy experiments was seen as negative. This generated strong incentives for importing foreign ideas (e.g., ET). In the finance case, a lack of local financial governance knowledge gave Western actors more influence over Chinese financial policy community’s beliefs from the very beginning. The local commitment to norm integration has been robust since the 1990s.Ph.D