title: Do trade deals encourage environmental cooperation?
Creators: name: Morin, Jean-Frédéric
name: Chaudhuri, Vera
name: Gauquelin, Mathilde
Publisher: name: German Development Institute / Deutsches Institut für Entwicklungspolitik (DIE)
publisherIdentifier: https://ror.org/01t3zke88
publisherIdentifierScheme: ROR
Year: 2018
Subjects: subject: Armut
subject: Handel
subject: Investitionen
subject: Poverty
subject: Environment
subject: Resources

description: Trade agreements have mixed effects on the environment. On the one hand, trade generates
 additional pollution by raising production levels. Trade rules can also restrict the
 capacity of governments to adopt environmental regulations. On the other hand, trade
 agreements can favour the diffusion of green technologies, make production more efficient
 and foster environmental cooperation. Whether the overall effect is positive or negative
 partly depends on the content of the trade agreement itself. Recent studies have found
 that trade agreements with detailed environmental provisions, in contrast to agreements
 without such provisions, are associated with reduced levels of CO2 emission and suspended
 particulate matter (Baghdadi et al., 2013; Zhou, 2017). It remains unclear, however, which
 specific provisions have a positive environmental impact and how they are actually
 implemented.
 
 This briefing paper discusses how provisions on environmental cooperation in trade
 agreements can contribute to better environmental outcomes. It is frequently assumed that
 the more enforceable environmental commitments are, the more likely governments are to
 take action to protect the environment (Jinnah &amp; Lindsay, 2016). This assumption
 leads several experts to argue in favour of strong sanction-based mechanisms of dispute
 settlement in order to ensure the implementation of trade agreements’ environmental
 provisions. Nevertheless, there is evidence to suggest that softer provisions can result
 in increased environmental cooperation, which can in turn favour domestic environmental
 protection (Yoo &amp; Kim, 2016; Bastiaens &amp; Postnikov, 2017). The European
 Union privileges this more cooperative approach in its trade agreements, and a recent
 European non-paper (2018) stresses that a sanction-based approach is a disincentive for
 ambitious environmental commitments and can result in a political backlash.
 
 To shed light on this debate, this paper examines the design and the implementation of
 cooperative environmental provisions of trade agreements. Our analysis is based on three
 main data sources. First, we make use of the TRade &amp; ENvironment Dataset (TREND)
 which provides information on 285 types of environmental provisions included in 688 trade
 agreements signed since 1947 (Morin et al., 2018; see also www.TRENDanalytics.info for an
 online visualisation tool for the data). Second, we draw on official documents to better
 understand how these provisions are implemented domestically. Third, we fill the gaps
 using information provided by 12 interviewees who work for 7 different governments.
 
 This briefing paper is organised in four parts. We first provide an overview of some
 general trends in treaty design. In sections 2 to 4, we then take a closer look at
 selected types of provisions that prove particularly relevant due to their prevalence: (a)
 general commitments to cooperate on environmental issues; (b) clauses creating
 international environmental institutions; (c) provisions on technical and financial
 assistance from one party to another. We find that both the implementation of these
 provisions and their contribution to environmental protection vary depending on the degree
 of legal precision, the budgeting of financial resources and governments’ political
 commitment. Based on these findings, we suggest that trade negotiators should i) lay out
 precise clauses with specific targets and clear time frames, (ii) specify in the trade
 agreement where the funding for cooperation activities will be sourced and (iii) create
 forums where civil society actors can engage in a dialogue with policy-makers on the
 implementation of trade agreements.
description: Briefing Paper, 8/2018