Public protests and environmental policy‐making: The cases of Xiamen antiparaxylene protests in China and the civic movement against Kodaikkanal mercury poisoning in India.

Emerging environmental challenges continuously push against the theoretical and methodological borders of the International Relations discipline, in terms of new understandings about agency‐structure dynamics and state behavior. A comparative analysis of non‐Western polities such as India and China bring forth interesting observations regarding state praxis in dealing with the above‐mentioned challenges. This study assesses environmental NIMBY (Not In My Backyard) protests in Xiamen, China using fieldwork observations from September 2016 to December 2016 and September 2017 to July 2018 and undertakes a comparison with a major protest movement in Tamil Nadu, India. (NIMBY stands for Not In My Backyard. NIMBY protests denote the objection of local citizens to the installation of environmentally hazardous projects in their vicinity.) The comparative assessment of protests in both countries reveals that despite dissimilarities in political cultures, new media advocacy and Environmental Nongovernmental Organizations (ENGOs) are the key factors directly responsible for facilitating public participation in environmental policy‐making in both countries. It also suggests that comparative analyses can unravel similarities among the interaction among social institutions in dealing with issues such as environmental threats across spatial and temporal dimensions. The study is based on a discursive analysis of technical study reports, media reporting, and extensive interviews and fieldwork observations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]