中国的经济发展以环境恶化为代价。现有学界研究关注国际规范扩散和政策学习对中国环境治理的正面影响。但是，中国的政策过程仍然保持一种源自于毛泽东时代的运动式的特征。本文基于中国陕西省两个县的案例分析对“国际影响”范式进行质疑。比较案例研究发现，两个同样深度卷入德国复兴银行造林合作的县（B和W)在政策学习和后续制度变迁中呈现不同状态。研究指出政策学习推动者的能力强弱影响了政策学习的效果，强的学习推动者更易带来学习和实质性的制度变化。这一结论表明，中国政策过程中由国际合作者带来的规范和知识的扩散与学习过程仍然十分困难。

China’s remarkable economic development has been achieved at the cost of its environment. Scholarly attention on international norm diffusion and policy learning asserts that international influence could make a positive impact on China’s environmental politics. However, the policy process in China still retains the campaign style, which dates back to Mao’s era. This case study of two inland counties in Shaanxi province provides empirical material that partially challenges the so-called international influence approach. County B and W, which were involved in an international forestry cooperation project with the Kreditanstalt für Wiederaufbau (KFW), both learned from their partner in subsequently implementing the Grain for Green project, but with different levels of learning and, consequently, different institutional changes. The findings based on these two counties indicate an important factor other than the structure of international influence, one which definitely affects policy learning and the resultant changes made by local bureaucrats, namely local learning agents; thus, a locality with a strong local learning agent is more likely to induce learning and substantive institutional changes. The findings also underscore the difficulty in spreading new norms and knowledge from international actors to the Chinese government. The impact of international influence in enhancing domestic governance cannot be taken for granted.