The Belt and Road Green Development Coalition, established in 2019, was created for the purpose of developing a set of ‘green’ project development standards to be utilized by Chinese and BRI host country stakeholders in the construction of BRI projects. These forthcoming standards are reflected in BRIGC reports and informed by an assemblage of industry, government, and NGO actors. Curiously, environmental NGOs (eNGOs) with outsized impacts on China’s domestic environmental governance through the use of environmental public interest litigation (EPIL) are all but unrepresented within this coalition. Instead, eNGOs shaping industry standards like climate disclosures and novel ideas such as energy grid interconnectedness are represented in the BRGIC. This paper builds upon existing constructivist literature regarding China and the BRIGC’s norm localization and subsidiarization to understand the forces that compel Chinese eNGOs influence governance in primarily domestic or international realms created by political leadership. Using People’s Court Case Database EPIL case rulings and BRIGC reports, it argues eNGOs with strong international norms crystallized into international law best leverage their experience and expertise in domestic realms while those with engaged with moderately strong or weak norms best influence governance in organizations like the BRIGC. Qualitative content analysis of norms mentioned in BRIGC reports and their strengths is conducted to support the claims of this paper.