While thousands of international treaties have been concluded, it remains unclear whether they have been implemented. This article investigates the relationship between the conclusion of environment-related international treaties and the adoption of domestic environmental legislation. Thanks to data sets that are considerably more comprehensive and fine-grained than those previously used, we can analyze the direct link to environmental legislation rather than the less direct link to environmental outcomes. Moreover, we can disaggregate for specific environmental issue areas. Our results suggest a positive relationship between domestic environmental legislation with both international environmental agreements and preferential trade agreements (PTAs) with environmental provisions. This link is more robust for PTAs, mostly present in developing countries, more pronounced before rather than after the treaties’ entry into force, and shows significant variation depending on the issue area. These findings contribute to the literature on environmental regime effectiveness and the domestic impact of treaties.
The increasing uptake of environmental provisions in preferential trade agreements (PTAs) is well documented, but little is known about why countries prefer certain types of provisions over others. This contribution exploits a fine-grained dataset on environmental provisions in PTAs and hypothesizes that environmental provisions are more likely to be adopted when they aim at preserving countries' regulatory sovereignty. It finds that the likelihood of adoption is indeed higher for defensive provisions, but this likelihood decreases if there is a large variation in PTA members' stringency of environmental regulations, and in particular, for PTAs with asymmetric power relationships. The results suggest that, while countries first and foremost attempt to preserve their regulatory sovereignty when adopting environmental provisions, countries with stringent environmental regulations and strong bargaining power vis-à-vis their trading partners also try to level the playing field and pursue more offensive interests.
Most recent preferential trade agreements (PTAs) include environmental provisions. While a number of these environmental provisions remain rare and are incorporated in just a few PTAs, others are widely popular and are duplicated in more than 100 PTAs. We still lack a convincing explanation for this varying frequency. While the diffusion literature typically tries to explain how diffusion occurs, we investigate why certain provisions diffuse more often than others. We hypothesise that the initial conditions under which provisions first emerge determine the scope of their diffusion. Our results support this hypothesis and indicate that provisions originating from intercontinental agreements diffuse more often than others. At the same time, provisions first designed by economically powerful or environmentally credible countries are not related to more frequent occurrences of diffusion. These findings are of interest for the literatures on international institutions' design, interaction and diffusion.
The increasing uptake of environmental provisions in preferential trade agreements (PTAs) is well documented, but little is known about why countries prefer certain types of provisions over others. This contribution exploits a fine-grained dataset on environmental provisions in PTAs and hypothesizes that environmental provisions are more likely to be adopted when they aim at preserving countries' regulatory sovereignty. It finds that the likelihood of adoption is indeed higher for defensive provisions, but this likelihood decreases if there is a large variation in PTA members' stringency of environmental regulations, and in particular, for PTAs with asymmetric power relationships. The results suggest that, while countries first and foremost attempt to preserve their regulatory sovereignty when adopting environmental provisions, countries with stringent environmental regulations and strong bargaining power vis-à-vis their trading partners also try to level the playing field and pursue more offensive interests.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.