Advocacy channels and political resource dependence in authoritarianism: Nongovernmental organizations and environmental policies in China

Nongovernmental organizations are important in policy processes, but most studies supporting this argument are conducted in democracies. This article, therefore, focuses on China's environmental policy to discuss how environmental NGOs (eNGOs) conduct policy advocacy in authoritarian contexts. Based on interviews with eNGOs and scholars in China, I provide a typology to describe policy advocacy channels based on their formality and consistency and explain how channels are selected based on the political resources of eNGOs. This article reveals how policy advocacy is affected by one of the prominent features of authoritarian states-a monopoly of political power-and indicates that many tactics identified in current literature can be explained by the political resource endowments of NGOs. Additionally, this article also provides insights on the potential changes of the advocacy channels when the political control is tightened in the Xi era and how eNGOs cope with the new political situation.