Time: 4pm -5:30 pm, Friday, May 24

Venue: IB 1011

Speaker: Dr. Juliette Genevaz, Associate professor Political Science, Jean Moulin Lyon 3 University

Host: Dr. Coraline Goron, Assistant Professor of Environmental Policy, Duke Kunshan University

Speaker’s bio: Dr. Juliette Genevaz is an associate professor Political Science at Jean Moulin Lyon 3 University and a Research Fellow at the French Research Institute on East Asia (IFRAE/UMR 8043). After a DPhil in political science at the University of Oxford, she was a TransAtlantic Fellow for International relations and security in France (Institut Français des Relations Internationales) and Germany (Stiftung Wissenschaft und Politik) before becoming the inaugural China research fellow at the Institute for Strategic Research (Paris, France) in 2016-2021.

Abstract: Technical standardization is a mode of international negotiation that was born at the turn of the XXth century, in organizations such as the International Standardization Organization (ISO), the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC) and the International Telecommunications Union (ITU). It is led by experts in their field, mostly engineers. Since 2008, China has participated extensively in these three organizations’ technical committees that design technical standards through consensus.

To explain how Chinese standardization practices interact with other countries’, I will focus on the realm of the management of sustainable cities and communities, based on a comparison between French and Chinese approaches. Indeed, respective national standardization agencies structure international negotiations in the realm of standardization. Making the management of sustainable cities the object of international standardization negotiation was an endeavor led by French urban planners and policy-makers and Chinese actors have become key players in this debate.