CCA spcca Journal of Current Chinese Affairs 1868-1026 1868-4874 SAGE Publications Sage UK: London, England 10.1177/186810261804700101 10.1177_186810261804700101 Research Articles “Project Battle” or “Policy War”?: Protest, Advocacy, and the Outcomes of Environmental Contention in China Tang Phoebe Mengxiao PhD Political Science and International Relations from the University of Southern California in 2018.

Her research interests are accountability and public participation in authoritarian states, social movements, and environmental politics, with a geographical focus on Asia, especially China. This article is part of her dissertation, The Social Making of Authoritarian En-vironmentalism: Protest–Litigation Nexus and Policy Changes in China.

E-mail: <mengxiao@usc.edu> 1 2018 47 1 3 40 30 7 2017 17 2 2018 © 2018 SAGE Publications Ltd 2018 SAGE Publications Ltd, or GIGA German Institute of Global and Area Studies, unless otherwise noted. Manuscript content on this site is licensed under Creative Commons Licenses This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs 3.0 License (https://www.creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/3.0/) which permits any use, reproduction and distribution of the work as published without adaptation or alteration, provided the original work is attributed as specified on the SAGE and Open Access page (https://us.sagepub.com/en-us/nam/open-access-at-sage).

Over the past decade, several environmental protests against hazardous projects have been mounted across China. Though extensive scholarship has been devoted to the outcomes of environmental contention, a significant distinction between local government's one-off decision change regarding the specific project and long-term, locked-in policy change towards better governance has largely been overlooked. Meanwhile, environmental contention in authoritarian China has largely been studied in terms of disparate episodes, making systematic observation and effective comparison difficult. Using crisp-set qualitative comparative analysis (csQCA), this article investigates the effect of social contention on shaping environmental governance, analysing 20 influential cases of environmental protests in China from 2007 to 2014. It demonstrates that environmental contention efforts often yield different fruits in their “project battles” than in their “policy wars.” Moreover, this study argues that environmental protests necessitate ample effort of public policy from a variety of social agents with multifaceted mechanisms and strategies, highlighting the significance of the protest–advocacy linkage in extracting better governance from local states in authoritarian settings.

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