The Evolution of Taiwan's Climate Change Policy: Norm adoption by an outsider to the international regime

This paper analyzes how Taiwan, an outsider to the international climate regime, has adopted international climate change norms from the late 1980s through the early 2020s. Drawing on primary government documents, it traces the development of Taiwan's climate change policy through successive international milestones — the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, the Kyoto Protocol, the Copenhagen Accord, and the Paris Agreement. Despite being excluded from climate-related treaties and agreements as a non-member of the United Nations, Taiwan has consistently aligned its policy formation with international norms, progressively building institutional capacity, enacting and revising legislation, formulating policy guidelines, and independently developing and publishing its own NAMAs, INDC, and NDCs. This policy development direction has maintained its fundamental trajectory across successive administrations — from Lee Teng-hui and Chen Shui-bian through Ma Ying-jeou, Tsai Ing-wen, and Lai Ching-te — demonstrating a distinctive Taiwanese pattern of norm adoption under the structural constraint of non-party status. The findings of this paper show that insiders and outsiders to international regimes operate under different logics of norm adoption. By advancing the proposition that "strategic legitimation"— rather than internalization through socialization—serves as the primary pathway of norm adoption for outsiders, this paper contributes to extending the scope of norm lifecycle theory.