Designing Issue Linkages: Ambiguous and Aspiring Linkages for Office-seekers

• In Event: Poster Session: International Collaboration

Abstract

Existing studies find that environmental clauses in trade agreements negotiated by the European Union are more ambitious in their goals than those negotiated by the U.S. For example, American trade agreements have focused on narrowly defined environmental issues such as conservation of endangered species, whereas the E.U.-related trade agreements have included challenging environmental issues such as climate change. However, scholars also find that the rules on the enforcement of the E.U.’s environmental clauses are more ambiguous and less obligatory than those designed by the U.S. Given the political influences that Green parties have in the European Parliament and the legislative bodies of some E.U. member countries, the low levels of precision and obligation of the E.U.’s environmental-trade linkages are puzzling. With a focus on the E.U.’s trade agreements, this paper provides a generalizable theoretical framework that explains trade negotiators’ choices of legal language in designing issue linkages.

This poster zooms in on trade negotiators’ dilemma regarding the linking of environmental and trade issues. On the one hand, negotiators aim to amplify pro-trade mobilization by environmental constituents in the pre-ratification stage by giving buy-ins to environmental constituents, because it increases the size of pro-trade coalitions. On the other hand, trade negotiators feel the need to minimize the pressures for enforcement of environmental clauses in the post-ratification stage because enforcing environmental clauses has disruptive effects on trade transactions. Faced with the dilemma, trade negotiators attempt to strike a balance between mobilization effects in the present and enforcement pressures in the future.

When environmental activists have strong electoral motivations because their main mode of organization is legislative instruments, negotiators can buy the pro-trade support of environmental constituents by giving them ambitious environmental mandates in trade agreements (i.e. ensuring trade partner countries’ compliance with climate change-related agreements). Pre-ratification commitments to ambitious goals tend to be more useful for environmental activists to gain political influences when they are office-seeking. However, office-seeking environmental activists have weaker incentives to use individual cases of post-ratification non-compliance as their organizational strategy because technicality of non-compliance is difficult to prove to voters without expertise on environmental issues. As such, trade negotiators in this context buy office-seeking environmental groups’ support for trade by giving them ambitious environmental goals. Instead, negotiators can preserve the control over the interpretation of compliance decisions by making environmental clauses ambiguous and lower the pressure for enforcement.

I draw evidence from elite interviews with trade negotiators and politicians involved in the negotiations of the E.U.-Canada Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement (CETA), E.U.-South Korea Free Trade Agreement, and E.U.-Japan Economic Partnership Agreement. To show that office-seeking motivations of environmental groups play a role in designing issue linkages, I provide evidence that the non-office seeking environmental constituencies in the U.S. consider precise language as more important than their European counterpart. Using process tracing, I compare the select European agreements with the U.S. trade agreements with the similar set of partner countries: NAFTA, U.S.-Korea Trade Agreement, and Trans-Pacific Partnership.

Author

• Boram Lee, Harvard University