Negotiating environmental protection in trade agreements: A regime shift or a tactical linkage?

The prolific literature on the relationship between the trade and environmental regimes suffers from three shortcomings. First, it myopically focuses on multilateral institutions, while the vast majority of trade and environmental agreements are bilateral. Second, when studies consider preferential trade agreements’ (PTAs) environmental provisions, they are often limited to USA and EU agreements. Third, it examines how the trade and environmental regimes negatively affect each other, leaving aside their potential synergies. Conversely, this article assesses the potential contribution of PTAs to international environmental law. Several PTAs include a full-fledged chapter devoted to environmental protection and contain detailed commitments on various environmental issue areas. One possible scenario is that countries that are dissatisfied with traditional settings for environmental lawmaking engage in a process of “regime shifting” toward PTAs to move forward on their environmental agenda. The alternative is that PTAs’ environmental provisions are the result of “tactical linkages” and merely duplicate extant obligations from international environmental law to serve political goals. We shed light on this question by building on two datasets of 690 PTAs and 2343 environmental treaties. We investigate four potential contributions of PTAs to environmental law: the diffusion of multilateral environmental agreements (MEAs), the diffusion of existing environmental rules, the design of new environmental rules, and the legal prevalence of MEAs. The article concludes that the contribution of PTAs to the strengthening of states’ commitments under international environmental law is very modest on the four dimensions examined.

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Notes

To be clear, these two concepts are meant to describe the contribution (or absence of contribution) of PTAs to international environmental law, rather than negotiators’ intentions, insofar as both “regime shift” and “tactical linkage” can result from purely strategic motivations.

If we consider the ratification date of MEAs instead, the Treaty instituting the West African Economic Community contributed to the adoption of the rule on harmonization by 5 countries, i.e., when the PTA was signed, 4 countries had already signed but not yet ratified MEAs including this rule. The duration of the MEAs ratification process probably explains this discrepancy.

70% in the analysis based on ratification date, another 13% being attributable to the 1984 third Lomé Convention.

To be sure, several of these rules existed in domestic law, soft law, or case law well before their first inclusion in a trade or environmental treaty. However, tracing back their true origin is beyond the scope of this article, which focuses on conventional international law only.

For example, the PTA between Colombia and the USA [2006, art. 18.12 (6)], the Trans-Pacific Partnership [2016, art. 20.23 (1)], and the recent United States–Mexico–Canada Agreement [2018, art. 24.32 (1)].

Namely, the Fourth Lomé Convention (1989, art. 41), the European Association Agreement between the European Communities and Poland [1991, art. 80 (2)], and the European Association Agreement between the European Communities and Hungary [1991, art. 79 (2)].

Abbreviations

Central America Free Trade Agreement

Convention on Biological Diversity

Convention on the Conservation of Antarctic Marine Living Resources

Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of wild fauna and flora

Common Market for Eastern and Southern Africa

International environmental agreement

International Convention for the Prevention of Pollution from Ships

Multilateral environmental agreement

North American Free Trade Agreement

Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development

Preferential trade agreement

TRade and ENvironment Database

United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change

Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties

World Trade Organization

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Authors and Affiliations

1. Political Science Department, Université Laval, 1030 Avenue des Sciences Humaines, Québec, QC, G1V 0A6, Canada Noémie Laurens & Jean-Frédéric Morin

1. Noémie Laurens