Legal, Ethical and Cultural Issues U.S. companies face when moving operations to China.

Beyond free trade agreements governing cross-border commerce, the source of most global economic growth is attributed to business across interconnecting markets. Among the most attractive and complex markets, China stands out. Despite its appeal, American businesses are more likely to fail in China due to an overwhelming desire for an immediate return on investment while neglecting to consider or completely disregarding China's unique legal, ethical and cultural environment. This capstone project will give recommendations to help businesses succeed when entering China and avoid legal, ethical and cultural issues such as the ones that Google, Apple, and Yahoo experienced.

A Discursive Perspective on China's Global Politics of Climate Change, 1992-2013

This dissertation investigates China’s recent shift in its climate change policy with a refined discourse approach. Methodologically, by adopting a neo-Gramscian notion of hegemony, a generative definition of discourse and an ontological pluralist position, the study constructs a theoretical framework named “discursive hegemony” that identifies the “social forces” for enabling social change and focuses on the role of discursive mechanisms via which the forces operate and produce effects. The key empirical finding of this study was that it was a co-evolution of conditions that shaped the outcome as China’s climate policy shift. In examining the case, a before-after within-case comparison was designed to analyze the variations in the material, institutional, and ideational conditions, with methods including interviews, conventional narrative/text analysis and descriptive statistics. Specifically, changes in energy use, the structure of decision-making body, and the narratives about sustainable development reflected how the above three types of social force processed in China in the first few years of the 21st century, causing the economic development agenda to absorb the climate issue, and turning the policy frame for the latter from mainly a diplomatic matter to a potential opportunity for better-quality growth. With the discursive operation of the “Science-based development”, China’s energy policy has been a good example of the Chinese understanding of sustainability characterized by economic primacy, ecological viability and social green-engineering. This way of discursive evolution, however, is a double-edged sword that has pushed forward some fast, top-down mitigation measures on the one hand, but has also created and will likely continue creating social and ecological havoc on the other hand. The study makes two major contributions. First and on the empirical level, because China is an international actor that was not expected to cooperate on the climate issue according to major IR theories, this study would add one critical case to the studies on global (environmental) governance and the ideational approach in the IR discipline. Second and on the theory-building level, the model of discursive hegemony can be a causally deeper mode of explanation because it traces the process of co-evolution of social forces.

Sustainable Development and its Discontents

Sustainable development (or sustainability) is a decision-making framework for maintaining and achieving human well-being, both in the present and into the future. The framework requires both consideration and achievement of environmental protection, social justice and economic development. In that framework, environmental protection must be integrated into decisions about social and economic development, and social justice and economic viability must be integrated into decisions about environmental quality. First endorsed by the world’s nations in 1992, this framework is intended to provide an effective response to the twin global challenges of growing environmental degradation and widespread extreme poverty. Sustainability provides a framework for humans to live in harmony with nature, rather than at nature’s expense. It may therefore be one of the most important ideas to come out of the 20th century. In the last two decades, the framework has become a touchstone in nearly every economic sector and at every level of government, unleashing an extraordinary range of creativity in all of those realms. Sustainable development is having a significant effect on the practice of law and on the way in which laws are written and implemented. Understanding the framework is increasingly important for law makers and lawyers. As sustainable development (or sustainability) has grown in prominence, its critics have become more numerous and more vocal. Three major lines of criticism are that the term is “too boring” to command public attention, “too vague” to provide guidance, and “too late” to address the world’s problems. Critics suggest goals such as abundance, environmental integrity, and resilience. Beginning with the international agreements that shaped the concept of sustainable development, this Article provides a functional and historical analysis of the meaning of sustainable development. It then analyzes and responds to each of these criticisms in turn. While the critics, understood constructively, suggest ways of strengthening this framework, they do not provide a compelling alternative. The challenge for lawyers, law makers, and others is to use and improve this framework to make better decisions.

The Global Carbon Pricing Policy Solution to Climate Change

While the topic of climate change is controversial, the world needs to take a precautionary approach to reduce carbon dioxide emissions. With growing populations and increasing energy demands, solutions to cleaner energy need to be developed and implemented. In order to successfully reduce carbon dioxide emissions, a global carbon pricing policy needs to be developed that includes all countries and allows each region to utilize the best clean energy technology options along with economic incentives that will be the most effective. The research conducted in this project validates the hypothesis that placing a monetary price on carbon will allow natural, technological, and financial resources to come together to implement a feasible energy solution that will reduce global carbon dioxide emissions.