Exploring the hybridization from policy learning on the forest-certification schemes in China

Abstract

The policy of forest certification in China is a collaborative tactic for environmental entities to influence local politics based on the declaration of a national “Five-Year Plan” by President Xi Jin-Ping in the 2010s. This is due to the homogeneous impact led by the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) to hybridize Chinese forestry management with organizational autonomy, policy participation, and power-sharing. While the Chinese public agencies learned professional knowledge and institutions from the IOs, they also required the FSC to embrace the Chinese characteristics of local politics, standards, and the legitimacy of international principles. Two findings from the research are revealing: First, the FSC and IO’s central role of civil empowerment enhanced the China’s power-sharing with local stakeholders for cultivating the China certification scheme; second, the FSC’s principle modification embraced the Chinese characteristics to reform the policy hybridization mechanism under the political culture of Administrative Absorption of Society. The innovative purpose of this research is to employ the homogeneous and heterogeneous dimensions to explore the influential factors of policy hybridization from a network perspective.