Suchergebnisse

Triangular development cooperation (TDC) is an increasingly popular modality in the aid field. It is seen to have both huge potential and limits. As the largest emerging donor, China's participation in TDC has been put under the spotlight. This article proposes a working definition of TDC focused on the type of resources transferred, and establishes a data set on the projects that China was involved in, from 2005 to 2016. Moreover, it investigates China's perception of the TDC by analysing its official publications. It finds that (a) China holds an equivocal understanding of the TDC concept; (b) although China has been rhetorically stressing the importance of TDC, few real actions have been taken; (c) China prefers international organisations in TDC instead of traditional donors; and (d) like other actors, most of China's TDC projects are recorded in non-economic sectors. At the moment, China remains cautious regarding the modality. But considering the growing volume of Chinese aid and its visibility, a more proactive stance on TDC might better serve Chinese interests.

AbstractIn Western countries, the grassroots NGO coalition plays a significant role in promoting the public expression of vulnerable communities. Grassroots NGO coalition has gradually become the leading actor of national policy advocacy by resources and scale of community members. However, China's grassroots NGOs coalition face many restrictions regarding organizational resources and political opportunities structure. Firstly, the grassroots NGOs relatively lack professionalism, funding, and other critical organizational resources. Secondly, the grassroots NGOs themselves and their coalition have difficulty obtaining legal status and have no institutional channels for policy expression. This unfavorable situation requires them to innovate 'alternative' strategies for public expression. The article finds that the grassroots NGO coalition of vulnerable communities has built up the political legitimacy of advocacy action by absorbing powerful social and political elites. It has also cooperated with international NGO to make up for the lack of internal and external resources, which also can expand the social impact and public attention on policy advocacy. Then, the grassroots NGO coalition selects the existing institutional channel for individuals as an intermediary to contacting government officials, submitting policy proposals. Meanwhile, the grassroots NGO coalition adopts professional elites to build the professionalism and social legitimacy of proposals. National policy advocacy also expands the political opportunities structure of local advocacy by promoting local citizens and grassroots NGOs to conduct social surveys, providing policy templates, and communicating with daily virtual communities. The changing structure offers the possibility for continuous advocacy action.

The European Union is one of the earliest regions that commits to environmental protection and is also the conventional leader of global environmental governance. China is now in urgent need to govern environment and a key player in dealing with a number of global environmental challenges, including climate change. Since 1981, when the European Union and China began to contact in the field of environment, environment has been rising on the agenda of their bilateral relations. In 1994, the European Union and China established their first institution for environment. With the support of institutions, their environmental cooperation has stepped into width and depth. Today, environment is deeply involved in the Asia-Europe Meeting and the Annual Summit between the European Union and China, and a number of sectoral institutions on environmental policy, environmental technology, climate change, and energy have been established. Meanwhile, a considerable number of environmental projects have been implemented. The institutions do not only assist in the implementation of environmental projects, but also result in new institutions and the construction of the institutional architecture. However, they also experience some limits. Due to the "low-politics" stance of environment in global politics, the European and Chinese leaders are half-hearted to the practical operation of some of the institutions. In addition, these institutions are also ineffective in dealing with issues with conflictual interests involved, such as climate change and environmental technology transfer.

Answering how and why policies emerge and interact with one another will advance our understanding of the evolution of policies. The paper investigates policy emergence as a practice defining possible policy objects in a specific domain and policy interaction as a practice enabling the defined objects. To trace the policy evolution, we define three types of citations to describe policymaking processes, establish the citation and co-citation networks of policy documents, and then conduct a natural language processing-based bibliometric analysis. We reveal the patterns of policymaking practices and identify the focal policies in a given domain. The results within the context of Chinese innovation and entrepreneurial policies suggest the information contained in focal policies drives the direction of future policy themes, as well as regular policies, tend to cite focal policies and follow the ideas of focal policies to achieve their goals. Our findings also provide some implications for Chinese future policymaking.

Confronting the uncertain environment, this article adopts a case research approach to resonate with the studies of hybridity. It aims to explain how the perception of uncertainty in the institutional environment affects the adaptation of organizational structure in pursuing legitimacy for hybrid organizations. Based on the empirical data collected from a two-staged fieldwork and in-depth interviews, the case analysis concentrates on the correlation between the evolution of institutional logics and organizational structure change from a diachronic perspective. The findings indicate that in the face of competing and changing institutional logics, Chinese mass media organizations have gradually shifted from a dominated blending strategy in the exploration stage to a deeply compartmentalizing strategy in the stable stage. The hybrids can deal with the uncertainty of the institutional environment by enhancing the uncertainty of the organizational structure. Consequently, the case evolves an organizational integration through internal legitimacy. It manifests a possibility for hybrids of combining the two major response mechanisms in one process.

Abstract
Using hierarchical linear models, this article examines how factors at individual and policy levels influence public attitudes towards the social inclusion of children with special needs based on data collected from 1,602 samples and second-hand data in five cities. It is found that individual and policy factors have varying impacts on relationship support, social support, and public support for the social inclusion of children with special needs: (1) individuals who once gave help to children with special needs express strong support; (2) government policies may have a crowding out effect, that is, greater intensity of child policies may lower public support for the social inclusion of children with special needs; (3) different policies may interfere with each other, that is, child policies and disability policies may have the opposite effects on people's attitudes towards public support for the social inclusion of children with special needs.

Abstract
With the globalization of technology and the changes of society, the boundaries between childhood and adulthood have become increasingly blurred. Children's studies begin to re-examine the modern thinking and the binary opposition in childhood research, and propose that in order to adapt to the diversity and continuous influence of childhood, childhood research must look for and effectively use non-dualistic theoretical analysis resources. On the one hand, "actor-network theory" and "complexity theory" have provided such research with a theoretical basis, transcending the perspective of binary opposition, focusing on the long-term effects of childhood on individual public character and the public participation of children. On the other hand, information media technology and community participation play an important role in the building of contemporary childhood, especially for the vulnerable groups of children to gain the ability of public participation and enter the public sector. Childhood research requires a broad theoretical perspective and an interdisciplinary approach. It also requires attention to the processes and mechanisms of how children's participation influences the acquisition of individual public character. How to effectively use information technology to promote public participation, expand the existing public space and form an effective connection with practical community participation is the key to realizing a "good society" in the future for children.

Scholarship today asserts that the Chinese Party-state's media control strategy with regard to popular protests has changed from suppressive to proactive. Nevertheless, existing literature tends to regard the Chinese state as a monolithic and unitary actor, and neglects the heterogeneity in different levels of government in handling protests. This article attempts to make a modest contribution to the literature by viewing the Chinese state as heterogeneous and multilayered actors with respect to popular protests. The authors contend that due to the distinctive incentives as well as the context factor "hierarchical government trust", lower-level authorities, especially the local ones, have a lower tendency to adopt a proactive approach to controlling media coverage of protests than their central counterparts. The authors utilise the Wukan incident as a case study to corroborate their argument, and identify the specific strategies that various levels of the governments have adopted. (China/GIGA)