Presentation short abstract

China promotes itself as an environmental global leader, particularly in tackling desertification. This paper analyses China's model of desertification control, and identifies the challenges that China faces in exporting key elements of this model overseas.

Presentation long abstract

China has in recent years begun to position itself as a global environmental leader. This is particularly evident in the case of desertification: China has been establishing cooperative relations in the field of desertification prevention and control with countries from Mongolia to Mauritania. This cooperation is presented as the transfer of Chinese expertise and experience, with official media proclaiming a China’s ‘global model for desertification control’. In this paper, we analyse China’s attempts to control desertification domestically in order to disaggregate this Chinese ‘model’. Drawing on our own research on Chinese cooperation in Mongolia and the Sahel, we to argue that only certain elements of China’s domestic experience are being exported overseas. This points to a broader dilemma for China’s global environmental leadership, namely the tension between its foreign policy principle of non-intervention, and the large-scale socioecological engineering that defines its domestic model of environmental governance.