Environmental Policy Convergence: The Impact of International Harmonization, Transnational Communication, and Regulatory Competition

By Katharina Holzinger, Christoph Knill, Thomas Sommerer. International Organization, 2008

249 citations recorded by the source corpus.

In recent years, there is growing interest in the study of cross-national policy convergence. Yet we still have a limited understanding of the phenomenon: Do we observe convergence of policies at all? 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, namely international harmonization, transnational communication, and regulatory competition. In empirical terms, we analyze if and to what extent we can observe convergence of environmental policies across twenty-four industrialized countries between 1970 and 2000. We find an impressive degree of environmental policy convergence between the countries under investigation. This development is mainly caused by international harmonization and, to a considerable degree, also by transnational communication, whereas regulatory competition does not seem to play a role.

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, Political Science and International Relations

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/41386daf65814b46840ec3bc2b5901bde604c1cb

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Citations in the corpus

Do parties matter in internationalised policy areas? The impact of political parties on environmental policy outputs in 18 OECD countries, 1970-2000 (2010, methodology): “While domestic effects are well documented for international regimes and institutions (Holzinger et al. 2008a; Miles et al. 2002), it is especially the domestic impact of EU legislation that is of major relevance for environmental policy outputs in the Member States (Jordan & Liefferink 2004; Knill…”
Does trade liberalization lead to environmental burden shifting in the global economy? (2019, background): “…the ‘unbundling’ of value chains and the increased complexity of production networks across the globe have increased demand for government regulation in areas that extend beyond traditional tariff reductions and removals of other, conventional trade barriers (Horn et al., 2010; Rodrik, 2018).”
Does dialogue work? The effectiveness of labor standards in EU preferential trade agreements (2014, background): “In general, international institutions increase transnational communication through a variety of channels (Holzinger et al. 2008).”
Climate policy innovation in the South – Domestic and international determinants of renewable energy policies in developing and emerging countries (2014, result): “This underlines the institutional role of the EU as early mover in policies to promote RE and reduce greenhouse gases, and is in line with the policy convergence theories (Holzinger et al., 2008) and also with the findings of Biesenbender and Tosun (2014).”
Greening up: the effects of environmental standards in EU and US trade agreements (2017, background): “These networks also spur information sharing and learning on regulatory frameworks, which is crucial for motivating policy change (Keck and Sikkink 1998, Simmons et al. 2006, Holzinger et al. 2008).”
To what extent does transnational communication drive cross-national policy convergence? The impact of the bologna-process on domestic higher education policies (2011, background): “placing greater focus on the impact of transnational communication (e.g. Holzinger et al. 2008 ).”
Partisan Politics: The Empirical Evidence from OECD Panel Studies (2017, unknown): “Another measure of environmental outputs is the ENVIPOLCON dataset by Holzinger et al. (2008a, 2008b) covering, for example, water and air pollution control and soil protection. Knill et al. (2010) use the ENVIPOLCON data for 18 countries for four points in”
Kindred spirits or intergovernmental competition? The innovation and diffusion of energy policies in the American states (1990–2008) (2014, result): “These results support findings by Holzinger et al. (2008, 2011) that do not show diffusion due to regulatory competition in environmental policy, and by Biesenbender and Tosun (forthcoming) that show a complicated relationship between regulatory pressures and policy adoption.”