Beyond Reach? European and Australian intervention and internal competition in China's climate change policy
Chinese climate change policy after 2003 has developed markedly and since then has heavily borrowed from external, especially European, experiences. Emissions trading, car emission standards and chemical standards are just a few examples. Dr. Olivia Gippner’s project is part of a four-year study which began with the puzzle of why China is adopting climate policies that originate in other countries. What influence do the European Union and Australia as providers (and critics) of climate policies have on the policy adoption in a country as distant as China? The first part of the research (2011-2014) found that important and crucial roles were played by the EU as an agenda-setter and provider of scientific inputs which are channelled through the unique Chinese policy-making system and modified in the process. Chinese policy-making elites actively draw on European approaches and experiences, selectively adopting some of the norms which close a knowledge gap and fulfil requirements of bureaucratic empowerment. The theoretical model developed has so far only been applied to EU-China relations, but in order to validate and verify the relative role of external actors, Olivia’s present research looks at Australia-China relations.
Olivia Gippner is a Dahrendorf postdoctoral fellow on EU-East Asia relations at LSE IDEAS. She holds a PhD in political science from Freie Universität Berlin and the Berlin Graduate School of Transnational Studies for which she researched EU-China climate relations and Chinese policy-making. Olivia pursued a Master in Public Policy at the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy and a Bachelor in European Studies from the University of Malta. From 2011-2014 she worked as a research fellow at the NFG-Research Group on “Asian Perceptions of the EU” in Berlin, analysing Chinese participation in peacekeeping missions and EU-China security relations. Olivia has lived and worked in several countries in Europe and Asia and besides her academic research has been working and publishing as a policy analyst on Nepal’s energy crisis in Kathmandu from 2010-2011 and as a free lance consultant. She has published in academic and policy outlets and regularly presents her research at academic conferences and expert briefings.