scholarly journals Regional environmental governance: the NAFTA case

2012 ◽  
Vol 58 (No. 10) ◽  
pp. 454-466
Author(s):  
E. Cihelková
Keyword(s):  
North American ◽  
Environmental Governance ◽  
Trade Agreement ◽  
Regional Governance ◽  
Complex Nature ◽  
Agenda 21 ◽  
Environmental Cooperation ◽  
The North ◽  
Regional Agreements ◽  
Environment And Development

The United Nations Conference on Environment and Development held in Rio de Janeiro in 1992 elaborated the idea of sustainable development. A comprehensive document called the Agenda 21 provided an explanation how to achieve a sustainable economic development. Along the tools presented in the document, there emerged in practice a new regionalism which is based on the preferential trade agreements. Currently, regional agreements are of a more complex nature, so that they may include environmental cooperation, too. The aim of this paper is to illustrate, on the case of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), a possible approach of regional agreements to environmental cooperation. The paper is divided into four sections. The first one summarizes a general approach to addressing environmental issues within the integration groupings. The second tries to answer the question of whether the NAFTA confirms the general approach to the regional environmental governance. The third deals with the meaning and the failure of the regional governance for the assessment of the cross-border impact of the NAFTA/NAAEC on the environment. The fourth and last section gives an answer to whether the North American Agreement on Environmental Cooperation (NAAEC), as the environmental part of the NAFTA, is a good basis for the effective environmental governance in North America.    

Regional Governance of Global Climate Change: The North American Commission for Environmental Cooperation

2007 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 11-27 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michele M. Betsill
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
Global Climate Change ◽  
North American ◽  
Global Climate ◽  
Regional Climate ◽  
Regional Governance ◽  
Governance System ◽  
Environmental Cooperation ◽  
Climate Governance ◽  
The North

Over the past decade the governance of global climate change has evolved into a complex, multi-level process involving actors and initiatives at multiple levels of social organization from the global to the local in both the public and private spheres. This article analyzes the North American Commission for Environmental Cooperation (CEC) as one component of this multilevel governance system. Specifically, it evaluates the CEC as a site of regional climate governance based on three potential advantages of governance through regional organizations: a small number of actors, opportunities for issue linkage, and linkage between national and global governance systems. On each count I find that the benefits of a CEC-based climate governance system are limited and argue for greater consideration of how such a system would interact with other forms of climate governance in North America.

Regional Governance and Environmental Problems

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jörg Balsiger ◽  
Stacy D. VanDeveer
Keyword(s):  
Sustainable Development ◽  
Environmental Governance ◽  
International Political Economy ◽  
Environmental Issues ◽  
Regional Governance ◽  
Environmental Cooperation ◽  
Mountain Ranges ◽  
Early Twenty ◽  
International Environmental Politics ◽  
Regional Agreements

Only recently has international environmental politics scholarship focused more explicitly on “regionalism” as a distinct phenomenon, one which has received much more sustained attention among specialists in international security and international political economy. By the early twenty-first century, regional environmental governance had become commonplace. Since the term “region” has had different connotations in different disciplines, the analytic and empirical scope of studies of regional environmental governance has varied considerably. As such, analyses of regional environmental cooperation have incorporated both constructivist views of regions that transcend the nation-state grid, and rescaling arguments placing greater emphasis on subnational governments, transboundary mobilization, and the importance of ecoregional initiatives. Regional agreements increasingly point to some sort of ecoterritoriality, state actors are increasingly complemented by nonstate or substate actors, and the thematic scope increasingly expands beyond purely environmental issues to encompass broader notions of sustainable development. There are three typical types of regional agreements: interstate regional environmental governance, ecoregional environmental governance, and ecoregional sustainable development governance. Interstate regional environmental governance is most typical of regional economic organizations with an environmental mandate that covers single or multiple environmental issues. Meanwhile, ecoregional environmental governance is widely seen in agreements for mountain ranges, regional seas, or river basins. Case studies on marine and mountain regional environmental governance illustrate that various regional arrangement remain in quite different states of institutionalization. Yet they also illustrate the growth of ecoregionalism in transnational environmental governance.

The Strategic Timing of Position Taking in Congress: A Study of the North American Free Trade Agreement

1997 ◽  
Vol 91 (2) ◽  
pp. 324-338 ◽  
Author(s):  
Janet M. Box-Steffensmeier ◽  
Laura W. Arnold ◽  
Christopher J. W. Zorn
Keyword(s):  
Free Trade ◽  
North American ◽  
House Of Representatives ◽  
Free Trade Agreement ◽  
Trade Agreement ◽  
Critical Element ◽  
Vote Model ◽  
Political Actors ◽  
The North ◽  
Timing Model

A critical element of decision making is the timing of choices political actors make; often when a decision is made is as critical as the decision itself. We posit a dynamic model of strategic position announcement based on signaling theories of legislative politics. We suggest that members who receive clear signals from constituents, interest groups, and policy leaders will announce their positions earlier. Those with conflicting signals will seek more information, delaying their announcement. We test several expectations by examining data on when members of the House of Representatives announced their positions on the North American Free Trade Agreement. We also contrast the timing model with a vote model, and find that there are meaningful differences between the factors influencing the timing of position announcements and vote choice. Our research allows analysts to interpret the process leading up to the House action and the end state of that process.

scholarly journals Trade Creation and Trade Diversion in the North American Free Trade Agreement: The Case of the Agricultural Sector

2007 ◽  
Vol 39 (1) ◽  
pp. 121-134 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dwi Susanto ◽  
C. Parr Rosson ◽  
Flynn J. Adcock
Keyword(s):  
Free Trade ◽  
North American ◽  
Free Trade Agreement ◽  
Agricultural Sector ◽  
Trade Agreement ◽  
Trade Diversion ◽  
The North ◽  
Tariff Rates ◽  
Agricultural Imports ◽  
The U.S

This paper examines the effect of the U.S.-Mexico trade agreement under the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). The results suggest that U.S. agricultural imports from Mexico have been responsive to tariff rate reductions applied to Mexican products. A one percentage point decrease in tariff rates is associated with an increase in U.S. agricultural imports from Mexico by 5.31% in the first 6 years of NAFTA and by 2.62% in the last 6 years of NAFTA. U.S. imports from Mexico have also been attributable to the pre-NAFTA tariff rates. Overall, the results indicate that the U.S-Mexico trade agreement under NAFTA has been trade creating rather than trade diverting.

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