Empirical Analysis of the Climate-Change Relevance of Taiwan’s Proposed APEC Projects —A comprehensive survey based on the APEC Project database—

APEC projects are cooperative activities, such as policy dialogues, research and capacity building that member economies propose through APEC fora and implement mainly with APEC funds; they thus reveal the policy areas in which each economy seeks to use APEC. This paper conducts a comprehensive survey of all 309 projects proposed by Taiwan (Chinese Taipei) since 2006, using the APEC Project Database as its primary source, and classifies their relevance to climate change according to an original set of criteria. Approximately 31% of the projects proposed solely by Taiwan were climate-change-related, with substantial variation across APEC fora, ranging from 96.3% in the Energy Working Group to 8.2% in the Human Resources Development Working Group. An indirect comparison based on the composition of proposing fora suggests that this level exceeds the APEC-wide average and places Taiwan among the upper group of economies. The analysis also reveals that Taiwan-hosted specialized centers consistently accounted for approximately one-quarter of all climate-change-related projects. Furthermore, six of the 25 joint proposals involving China were concentrated entirely in the period of the Ma Ying-jeou administration (2008–2016) and extended beyond climate change to trade facilitation and ICT standardization. These findings suggest that Taiwan has utilized APEC as a multilateral framework for multiple purposes: securing legitimacy, substantively participating in the formation of international norms, and creating channels for depoliticized practical cooperation with China.