One consequence of China’s rapid industrialization and subsequent decision to wind up or relocate many of these enterprises and redevelop the vacated sites for other land-uses was a mounting realization of the problem of site contamination as an environmental issue, with potentially a long-lasting influence on the ecological system, public health, and property market. When this problem first emerged in China, specific laws and policies to manage the rehabilitation of contaminated sites were absent on both national and local levels. At that time, various policy actors including scholars, international think tanks, and local practitioners began to actively “transfer” extra-local policy knowledge from elsewhere. When this study was initiated in 2013 there was little research into the ways in which practitioners in this field (such as planners, engineers, and environmental consultants) engaged with globally circulating policies and creatively transferring these policies in their daily practice.

The objective of this research is to identify and evaluate the processes through which environmental consultants (as an influential group of practitioners) mobilize extra-local policy knowledge from elsewhere to China in their daily practice. The study covers the period from 2000 to 2016. According to a global scanning of laws and regulations dealing with site contamination, three main subjects of policy knowledge have been identified, namely, liability management, standard setting, and policy implementation. Building on the literature of transfer-related studies, the fledgling approach of policy mobility has been adopted as the theoretical basis for this research. This study finds that the transnationalization of the travelling policies (commonly regarded as something worth learning in this field) is not a linear process from place A to B as presented by traditional policy transfer; rather these policies are mobilized through a variety of socio-political mobilization processes facilitated by the strategies of translation, moulding, and self-transformation, which are embedded in environmental consultants’ daily practices.

This research presents three actor-centred case studies of three different groups of environmental consultants located in Beijing (People’s Republic of China) conducted between 2013 and 2016. Based on data collected from a combination of ethnographic observations undertaken at a number of conferences, together with semi-structured interviews and publicly available documents, it is found that environmental consultants have characteristic strategies to assemble extra-local policy knowledge, conditioned by the distinct institutional settings they live in, the various commercial demands they proposed, and more importantly the specific and sometimes unexpected political events and policy-induced opportunities. Moreover, the mobilization of extra-local policy knowledge which has been shaped by environmental consultants can also re-shape these practitioners in turn. As this thesis identified, certain elite environmental consultants have shifted their businesses from providing engineering and technical expertise to new professions as mobilizing agents.