Private Internationalism and Climate Politics Under Isolation: Taiwan as a Natural Experiment in Regime-Policy Decoupling

Liu and Chao (2023) show Taiwan’s climate policy is constrained by international isolation yet recently accelerated via corporate supply-chain pressures. This presents a rare opportunity to identify how non-IO transnational private governance can reconfigure domestic coalitions in ways usually attributed to international regimes. Pair Taiwan with matched cases integrated into formal climate regimes (e.g., Paris Agreement participants) and trace policy shifts, coalition composition, and participation channels (energy democracy vs centralized developmentalism). Bring in Røttereng (2018) on who promotes carbon sinks to probe whether private pressures favor certain mitigation pathways (CCUS, afforestation, supply-chain auditing) and how those pathways alter bureaucratic and party coalitions. Finally, contrast Taiwan’s coalition dynamics with China’s policy process patterns documented by Li et al. (2024), where policy change often occurs via imposition or between-coalition learning within a hierarchical system. The novelty is twofold: (1) theorizing “private internationalism” as a functional substitute for formal IO leverage, and (2) connecting climate policy realignments to regime adaptation—do expanded local participation channels under energy democracy meaningfully deepen democratic practice, or does developmentalist path dependence prevail? Findings would complicate dominant models that assume regime openness and international legalization are prerequisites for decarbonization and could show how market-driven transnational linkages reorganize domestic power even in politically atypical settings.

References:

1. The Comparative Politics of Climate Change Mitigation Measures: Who Promotes Carbon Sinks and Why?. J. S. Røttereng (2018). Global Environmental Politics.
2. Politics of climate change mitigation in Taiwan: International isolation, developmentalism legacy, and civil society responses. J. C. Liu, Chia‐Wei Chao (2023). WIREs Climate Change.
3. The politics of China's policy processes: A comparative review of the Advocacy Coalition Framework's applications to mainland China. Wei Li, Jonathan J. Pierce, Fang Chen, Fuguo Wang (2024). Politics & Policy.