The Impact of International Institutions and Trade on Environmental Policy Convergence

In recent years, there is a growing interest in the study of cross-national policy convergence, which is closely related to research on the domestic impact of globalisation. Yet we still have a limited understanding of the phenomenon of policy convergence. Does the strong growth of economic and institutional interlinkages between nation states lead to increasingly similar policies across countries? 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 often mentioned as important causes of cross-national policy convergence, namely regulatory competition, international harmonization and transnational communication. In empirical terms, we analyse, if and to what extent we can observe a convergence of environmental policies in Europe. For this purpose, we analyse the development of 40 environmental measures across 24 countries between 1970 and 2000. We observe in fact strong convergence of environmental policies over the last thirty years, as well as a clear rise in regulatory strictness. This development is mainly caused by international harmonization and to a certain degree by transnational communication, i.e.; it is rather an effect of global governance than of economic globalisation.