International Environmental Governance: A Comparative Analysis between the European Union and China's Index of Policy Activity

This master thesis is going to focus on the International Environmental Governance (IEG) and on the main policy instruments which have been recently developed by the international community in order to mitigate climate change and other environment-related issues. In particular, this survey is going to explore the latest environmental policy tools of two of the most influent actors in the International Environmental Governance: the European Union and the People's Republic of China. The two policy tools that will be analyzed in this context are the “2030 Climate and Energy Framework” for the European Union and the “China's Policies and Actions for Addressing Climate Change” published by the Ministry of Ecology and Environment in November 2019 for China. In order to draw objective and innovative evaluations, this research is going to imply, as methodology, the Index of Policy Activity (IPA) which has been developed in the study Toward a Comparative Measure of Climate Policy Output elaborated by the scholars André Schaffrin, Sebatian Sewerin and Sibylle Seubert in 2015. The IPA is an instrument which reveals reliable results in order to set out the intensity and the efficiency of a certain policy. This survey will try to answer to two research questions: the first one refers to the level of feasibility and adaptability of the Index of Policy Activity to new policy instruments and the second one is to understand how the European Union and China are engaging with the international system in facing global environmental challenges. In order to find the answer to the abovementioned questions, this thesis has been organized as follows. The first chapter is focused on the theoretical background and literature review of International Environmental Politics and International Environmental Governance. The second and the third chapters have been dedicated to the analysis of the role of the European Union and the People's Republic of China in the International Environmental Governance. The fourth chapter includes the evaluation of the European Union and China's environmental policy tools elaborated through the Index of Policy Activity. Moreover, it also incorporates the comparative analysis of the data. The fifth and last chapter draws the main conclusions, the remarkable outputs and the future shortcomings in the International Environmental Governance and Politics. The final aim of this research is to evaluate critically the level of efficiency of the selected policies not only from an internal point of view, but also at an international level. Moreover, this analysis will try to address if the European Union and China are positively contributing to solve the environmental issues and if they are actively cooperating for the building of a multilevel and integrated International Environmental Governance on the basis of the requirements set by international frameworks such as the Paris Agreement. The innovative value of this survey is the application of the Index of Policy Activity to the latest European and Chinese environmental policies and strategies with the purpose of enriching the existent literature and research regarding the International Environmental Governance area.