Environmental Policy Convergence: The Impact of International Harmonization, Transnational Communication, and Regulatory Competition

Abstract

In recent years, there is growing interest in the study of cross-national policy convergence+ Yet we still have a limited understanding of the phenomenon: Do we observe convergence of policies at all? Under which conditions can we expect that domestic policies converge or rather develop further apart? In this article, we address this research deficit+ From a theoretical perspective, we concentrate on the explanatory power of three factors, namely international harmonization, transnational communication, and regulatory competition+ In empirical terms, we analyze if and to what extent we can observe convergence of environmental policies across twenty-four industrialized countries between 1970 and 2000+ We find an impressive degree of environmental policy convergence between the countries under investigation+ This development is mainly caused by international harmonization and, to a considerable degree, also by transnational communication, whereas regulatory competition does not seem to play a role+ It became obvious with the fourth report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change 1 in spring 2007 that the need to combat climate change and to deal with its consequences is one of the world's most pressing problems+ Because the human contribution to climate change is related to a broad range of activities, such as energy use and production, transport, industrial and agrarian production, and tropical deforestation, combating it-through the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions-is not only costly but also requires profound behavioral changes+ Moreover, the global nature of the climate problem underlines the need for inter-

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