Domestic Institutions and International Regulatory Cooperation: Comparative Responses to the Convention on Biological Diversity

International regimes develop in three general ways: through coercion, convergence ("harmony"), or mutual state choice. Lasting coercive cooperation is rare. 1 Harmony is of limited interest. 2 In the majority of cases--and those of the greatest theoretical and practical significance--regimes arise through explicit state choices to cooperate. This article explores state choice toward international regulatory regimes for environmental protection. Regulatory regimes are frequently aimed at diffuse private actors and behaviors. International regime rules are commonly transformed into binding domestic rules or standards; regulatory cooperation, and environmental cooperation in particular, is marked by the degree to which this process of implementation relies upon and is shaped by existing domestic institutions and political structures. Because regulatory regimes at the international level are nearly always administrated through regulatory regimes at the domestic level, the latter, in conjunction with the politics new regulation [End Page 482] engenders, are central to understanding state choice. While many analyses have examined the role of domestic politics in international cooperation, I focus on domestic institutions. This article shows how institutions, in conjunction with the interests of key societal actors and the political incentives faced by governments, help to determine the expected political, economic, and legal impact of international commitments. Given that states are collectively the architects of international institutions, and these anticipated effects thus partly endogenous, the domestic regulatory structures of powerful states can also be critical influences on the scope, structure, and terms of international institutions. To develop these claims, I examine an important recent case of international environmental cooperation, the protection of global biological diversity ("biodiversity"), and analyze the divergent responses of two leading states to the core agreement of the new regime. While the United Kingdom signed and ratified the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD), 3 negotiated as one of the keystones of the 1992 United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED), the United States refused to do so. Both states were active participants in the negotiations and shared a host of similarities: the likelihood both of harm from biodiversity loss and of gain from biodiversity protection, positions as economic powers, intensity of biotechnology and pharmaceutical industries, antiregulatory leadership, and positions on critical issues like intellectual property protection. Two theoretical perspectives that examine areas of potential difference are used to explore this divergence in choice toward the CBD. Building on the seemingly central role played by science and scientists in the formation of environmental regimes, Peter Haas and others have developed a prominent knowledge-based account of state behavior in which epistemic influence, built on positive and normative understandings shared by an elite community of experts, explains much of the observed intergovernmental coordination in environmental affairs. 4 An alternative perspective, that I term "regulatory politics," proposes that variations in core domestic institutions critically shape the anticipated impact of regime rules and hence the domestic politics of international cooperation.