PLEASE NOTE - The times are Western Australian local time. The seminar will run from 1.30pm to 2.30pm Eastern Australia Time.
Join the Seminar here:
Microsoft Teams meeting
Join: https://teams.microsoft.com/meet/44068783142236?p=Cc1bA5AWjMICjRGTqn
Meeting ID: 440 687 831 422 36
Presented by Dr Nathan Fioritti, Lecturer in Politics in the School of Social Sciences at Monash University, and Dr Nuan Song, Research Fellow at Nanyang Technological University.
China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) has become central to extending the state’s structural power and establishing its role in global environmental governance. In 2017, China initiated a green reorientation of the BRI to address growing environmental criticisms and attract broader and deeper engagement from sceptical states. In particular, higher-income states, which had been less likely to engage with the BRI in its early years, face constraints when it comes to deepening economic ties with China. These include both geopolitical constraints and those stemming from incompatible environmental standards (Coenen et al. 2021), however, most scholarly work on the BRI still centres its geopolitical dimensions.
This seminar and paper examines whether the Green BRI strategy has reshaped the initiative's global engagement patterns, with a particular focus on whether it has encouraged engagement from states with higher environmental standards that were previously hesitant. The mixed methods study investigates the relationship between national environmental standards and BRI engagement, focusing on 80 states between 2013 and 2020.
The results of the quantitative analyses show that environmental standards became a stronger predictor of BRI engagement in the post-2017 period, with higher environmental standards associated with greater BRI engagement. These findings indicate that the Green BRI strategy has boosted participation among target states. The paper presents case studies of two states that increased BRI engagement after 2017 – Italy and Portugal – to illustrate how increased participation played out within these states and further demonstrate how China’s efforts to reorient the BRI towards greener development have reshaped global engagement patterns.