Description
Over the past two decades, China's environmental security discourses have shifted from systematic resistance to the securitisation of climate change at the international level to the progressive institutionalisation of "ecological security" across its national security architecture and foreign policy. Yet this shift does not represent straightforward convergence with Western security framings. This paper argues that China's environmental security discourses operate through a productive dual grammar: a structured coexistence of two security logics enacted simultaneously at different scales. At the international level, the language of ecological security — most legibly in the 2023 Global Security Initiative (GSI) Concept Note — functions as a norm-making instrument that insulates China's developmental sovereignty from externally imposed climate conditionality. At the domestic level, environmental governance proceeds through a disciplinary-developmental vocabulary of 'ecological civilisation' that deliberately suppresses security exceptionalism, preserving the Party-state's monopoly over the terms and pace of ecological transition. Drawing on work on climate securitisation modalities and Foucauldian governmentality, this paper extends securitisation theory by introducing scale as an explicit analytical variable. It provides the first systematic analysis of the GSI Concept Note as a site of ecological security norm-making, read alongside China's authoritative domestic corpus of Ecological Civilisation governance.