Your new experience awaits. Try the new design now and help us make it even better

ORIGINAL RESEARCH article

Front. Mar. Sci.

Sec. Marine Pollution

Volume 12 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fmars.2025.1631261

This article is part of the Research TopicAdvances in Marine Environmental Protection: Challenges, Solutions and Perspectives Volume IIView all 27 articles

Embeddedness analysis of a native Chinese NGO participating in international plastic treaty negotiations from the perspective of network institutionalism

Provisionally accepted
Yan  ZhaoYan Zhao1,2*Huo  WangHuo Wang3*Yue  Guang GaoYue Guang Gao4
  • 1Ocean University of China, Qingdao, China
  • 2Department of Politics and Administration, School of International Affairs and Public Administration, Ocean University of China, Qingdao, Shandong Province, China
  • 3China biodiversity Conservation and Green Development Foundation, beijing, China
  • 4School of Management, Ocean University of China, Qingdao, Shandong Province, China

The final, formatted version of the article will be published soon.

In the global governance of marine plastic pollution, the "negotiation-driven governance model" of accelerating negotiations is used in order to issue plastics treaties to deal with the problem of plastic pollution including marine plastic pollution while little empirical evidence exists concerning the participation process and strategy of native Chinese NGOs in plastics treaty negotiations. To illustrate the embeddedness strategy that native Chinese NGOs used to attract resources from social individuals and strive for a voice in the "Intergovernmental Negotiation Conference (INC), this research utilized observation method and is grounded in a series of interviews with people associated with native Chinese NGOs in plastics treaties negotiations.In this study, the participation of native Chinese NGOs in the INC series was taken as empirical evidence, and a normative bridging framework which is developed by "embeddedness" combined with network institutionalism theory to analyze how native Chinese NGOs interact with social individuals and in international affairs led by the United Nations, at the same time, network institutionalism analysis, also exists to describe the domestic and international institutional environment of the case native Chinese NGO. This research employs a qualitative case study approach to facilitate an in-depth investigation and detailed understanding of the complex and nuanced development of native Chinese NGOs in plastic treaty negotiations through observation and systematic interviews method. This research empirically contributes to existing network institutionalism theories through the development of a NGO normative bridging framework to illustrate the relationship between native Chinese NGOs, individuals, and international negotiations in world political and international relationship issues.

Keywords: Network Institutionalism Theory, Embeddedness theory, International Plastics Treaty Negotiation, Native Chinese NGOs, Marine Environmental Sustainability

Received: 19 May 2025; Accepted: 04 Aug 2025.

Copyright: © 2025 Zhao, Wang and Gao. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

* Correspondence:
Yan Zhao, Ocean University of China, Qingdao, China
Huo Wang, China biodiversity Conservation and Green Development Foundation, beijing, China

Disclaimer: All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.