Cooperating on new sustainable visions with old global politics? An interpretative analysis of China-EU circular economy discourse

Medientyp: E-Book; Hochschulschrift

Titel: Cooperating on new sustainable visions with old global politics? An interpretative analysis of China-EU circular economy discourse

Beteiligte: Luo, Anran [Verfasser:in]; Leipold, Sina [Akademische:r Betreuer:in]; Leipold, Sina [Sonstige Person, Familie und Körperschaft]; Späth, Philipp [Sonstige Person, Familie und Körperschaft]; Li, Yifei [Sonstige Person, Familie und Körperschaft]; Eckert, Sandra [Sonstige Person, Familie und Körperschaft]

Körperschaft: Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg, Professur für Gesellschaftliche Transformation und Kreislaufwirtschaft ; Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg, Fakultät für Umwelt und Natürliche Ressourcen

Erschienen: Freiburg: Universität, 2023

Umfang: Online-Ressource

Sprache: Englisch

DOI: 10.6094/UNIFR/233589

Identifikator:

Schlagwörter: Internationale Kooperation ; Global Governance ; Umweltpolitik ; Diskursanalyse ; Internationale Politik ; Entwicklungspolitik ; China ; international cooperation ; circular economy ; China-EU relations ; waste politics ; discourse ; (local)doctoralThesis ; Hochschulschrift

Entstehung:

Hochschulschrift: Dissertation, Universität Freiburg, 2022

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Beschreibung: Abstract: Circular economy (CE) has become a prominent international environmental discourse that unites diverse stakeholders behind a new sustainable vision. While CE proponents have called for its globalization through international cooperation, CE literature reveals little consensus on its conceptualization, standardization, and implementation. Scholars note that insufficient work has been done on CE development in ‘industrializing’ economies, echoing the lack of academic emphasis on Global North-South interactions in environmental politics. Furthermore, few studies on international cooperation discourse focus on CE’s main domains: resource, waste and broader sustainable production and consumption. Given these research gaps, this dissertation investigates CE coordination in the international relations of China and the European Union as a meaning-making process and evaluates its potentials and challenges for addressing global environmental problems. The conclusions show that while CE opened up a new diplomatic arena for China-EU cooperation, international CE coordination is ad-hoc, uncoordinated and has not transformed collective responses to global environmental challenges. For CE, or any other new environmental paradigm, to achieve fundamental transitions, cooperation stakeholders will need to 1) address the politics of scale, trade and development, 2) co-create discursive spaces for communication, contestation, negotiation and empathy development when cooperation is challenged by political tension, as well as 3) take time to understand opposing viewpoints and make contingency plans for differences that cannot be met with compromise. Overall, this dissertation makes four key scientific contributions. First, it advances the application of discourse analysis and the emergent discursive agency research arena by showing how discourse coalitions and agency manifest in the realm of international cooperation between ‘old’ (the EU) and ‘new’ (China) environmental leaders. Second, it expands CE scholarship by deepening the understanding of CE as a concept, scrutinizing the political dimensions of scaling CE up from the (supra)national to the international arena. Third, it enhances critical eco-modernist literature, which is typically focused on national contexts, and demonstrate its challenges for global environmental politics and governance. Last but not least, by making explicit the diverse plethora of ‘old global politics’ (e.g. trade and development) affiliated with international CE cooperation, this dissertation highlights the diverse knowledge and expertise needed to upscale new transformative concepts such as the CE. Thus, this dissertation provides empirical evidence that international environmental cooperation would benefit from more systematized, integrated and comprehensive knowledge inputs from a multitude of research fields such as centralized and multi-level governance, international/regional trade, international/comparative development, environmental sociology, urban studies, and political geography

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