Tan-Mullins, Dynamics of international aid in the Chinese context: a case study of the World Bank's Cixi Wetlands Project in Zhejiang Province. China Quarterly, .

: It is the scale and immensity of the People’s Republic of China’s (PRC) environmental degradation that contests the successfulness of its hyper-growth over the past 30 years. None of China’s waters, soil, air, biodiversity and other notable environmental aspects has been immune to widespread pollution and destruction. Despite that, the problem have been clearly recognised and the ever strengthening efforts for environmental protection from Beijing, implementation and initiatives on the local level remains weak resulting from a mix of political, societal and economic factors, which has been under the spotlight of recent research on China’s environment. Since the 1980s, in parallel with the PRC’s increasing participation in global environmental governance by joining multilateral environmental agreements (MEAs) such as the Kyoto Protocol and the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, a few international actors have also been allowed into China’s environmental governance by means of development aid. Though the body of literature that specialises on this aspect is yet embryonic, the accounts available suggest that international involvement in local environmental projects may mitigate the constraints posed by conventional obstacles to good local environmental governance. By examining a bilateral project between the World Bank and Ningbo in Cixi, this article aims at testing the findings of the existing literature, and seeks to specify the dynamics of this partnership in two areas: the local government’s commitment and the project’s management and implementation, which are found to be explicitly at stake for the interaction between the international and the local partner. This inquiry answers the following three research questions: (a) How important is the local context in the diffusion of international norms as in our case represented by World Bank policies and procedures? (b) What determinants have contributed to the World Bank’s leverage role in restructuring local project governance? (c) What are the changes due to the Bank’s involvement?

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