Unveiling the development of China’s climate policies based on public administration: A scientometric analysis (2000–2024)

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Climate policies and governance in China have rapidly evolved since the 21st century and are of global significance with the challenges of climate change. This article provides a bibliometric analysis of major Chinese journal articles published from 2000 to 2024 to characterize the intellectual landscape of climate policies research by visualizing its evolution and identifying the challenging issues. The findings show that publications on this topic have surged since the 2000s and the cooperative network has constantly grown, albeit with a relatively loose structure. Overall, China’s has experienced periods of fast growth shifting from being an underlying follower to an active global leader in climate governance, basically focusing on the system construction and policy instruments. The overview reveals some challenges awaiting improvement for China’s current climate policies, including: (1) legislative bottlenecks at the national level; (2) drawbacks for the policy instruments; (3) trade-offs between central-local governments; and (4) insufficient public participation for the policy process. On these bases, we further propose enlightenment for more interdisciplinary cooperation in future’s research and identify policy implications to promote the sustainable climate governance.