NGOs as policy entrepreneurs: transnational advocacy and policy influence in greening the Belt and Road Initiative

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.