This special issue demonstrates the importance of interactions in transnational business governance. The number of schemes applying non-state authority to govern business conduct across borders has vastly expanded in numerous issue areas. As these initiatives proliferate, they increasingly interact with one another and with state-based regimes. The key challenge is to understand the implications of these interactions for regulatory capacity and performance, and ultimately for social and environmental impact. In this introduction, we propose an analytical framework for the study of transnational business governance interactions. The framework disaggregates the regulatory process to identify potential points of interaction, and suggests analytical questions that probe the key features of interactions at each point.

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The interactive effects of climate change and invasive alien species (IAS) pose serious threats to biodiversity, ecosystems and human well-being worldwide. In particular, IAS are predicted to experience widespread changes in distribution in response to climate change, with many expanding their ranges into new areas. However, the two drivers of global change are seldom considered together in policy and management. We conducted a knowledge synthesis to assess the state of research on IAS range shifts under climate change in Canada. We found that the study of IAS distribution changes caused by climate change is a relatively new field of inquiry that integrates research in the areas of ecology, conservation biology, and environmental sciences. The multidisciplinary dimensions of the issue are largely overlooked in the scholarly literature, with most studies having a purely natural science perspective. Very little original research has occurred in the field to date; instead literature reviews are common. Research focuses on modeling range changes of current IAS threats, rather than predicting potential future IAS threats. The most commonly studied IAS already occur in Canada as native species that have spread beyond their range (e.g., lyme disease, mountain pine beetle, smallmouth bass) or as established invaders (e.g., gypsy moth). All of these IAS are expected to expand northward with climate change, resulting in widespread negative impacts on forest and freshwater biodiversity, carbon sequestration, and public health. Many barriers to predicting IAS range change under climate change are identified in the literature, including the complexity of the issue, lack of ecological data, and failure to integrate climate change – IAS interactions into research, policy, and management. Recommendations for increased research and monitoring, and the need for policy and management reform predominate in the literature.

Nine years ago, Kenneth Abbott published an article exhorting international lawyers to read and master regime theory, arguing that it had multiple uses for the study of international law. He went as far as to call for a “joint discipline” that would bridge the gap between international relations theory (IR) and international law (IL). Several years later, one of us followed suit with an article mapping the history of the two fields and setting forth an agenda for joint research. Since then, political scientists and international lawyers have been reading and drawing on one another’s work with increasing frequency and for a wide range of purposes. Explicitly interdisciplinary articles have won the Francis Deák Prize, awarded for the best work by a younger scholar in this Journal, for the past two years running; the publication of an interdisciplinary analysis of treaty law in the Harvard International Law Journal prompted a lively exchange on the need to pay attention to legal as well as political details; and the Hague Academy of International Law has scheduled a short course on international law and international relations for its millennial lectures in the year 2000. Further, the American Society of International Law and the Academic Council on the United Nations System sponsor joint summer workshops explicidy designed to bring young IR and IL scholars together to explore the overlap between their disciplines.