Policy Spillover and the Emergence of Environmental Clauses in PTAs

• In Event: Addressing Climate Change: NGOs, States, and People

Abstract

Preferential trade agreements increasingly contain extensive environmental chapters. Within this broad trend, there is wide variation in the number and the level of legalization of such clauses, even when holding treaty partners fixed. How might this variation be explained? In this paper, I argue that environmental clauses are often included in response to other market access provisions, such as the harmonization of standards, or investment protections. Such provisions mobilize environmentalists, as they hold the potential to interfere with domestic environmental policy. This mobilization, I argue, is more likely to translate into far-reaching environmental chapters if the ratification process allows for civil society access and if the environmental community within a treaty-partner is well-organized.
The paper draws on a mixed-methods approach. A historical account of the first PTA with an explicit environmental chapter – NAFTA – illustrates that a number of market access provisions helped drive the sudden interest among the environmental community. Field interviews conducted with policy-makers and environmental lobbyists across Europe confirm that similar dynamics were at play during the recent negotiations of TTIP and CETA. In a second part, this paper presents a quantitative analysis of all trade treaties since 1987 and their environmental content. Drawing on multiple DESTA datasets, as well as newly constructed measures of civil society strength and the domestic ratification process, I show that certain market access clauses tend to co-occur with stricter environmental provisions. The analysis further shows that this relationship is stronger in countries that have a more active environmental civil society and in constituencies where the ratification process grants these actors more access to the policy-making process.

Author

• Christina Luise Toenshoff, Stanford University