Regulating Air: European Leadership and the Transatlantic Clean Air Relationship

The paper investigates cross-national European Union leadership in the field of environmental policy, focusing on contemporary ‘clean air’ policies and the air pollution regulations preceding them. Existing research has found that the European Union is a leader in environmental protection across the world. However, we have a limited understanding of how far this leadership goes and whether it results in aligned regulatory policies either through direct requirements of the diffusion of policy from one nation to another. In this paper we focus on the EU’s transatlantic partners, the US and Canada due to their long-standing, but differing relationships with the EU with the added control of the UK as a EU member state. This work will produce systematic empirical evidence of the degree that regulatory policy has transferred across borders. The paper addresses how and why the European Union influences environmental policy regulation in the area of air pollution in the United States of America, Canada, and the United Kingdom. In this paper, we present the original quantitative data generated through content analysis of policy documents and discuss our models of EU’s regulatory influence with its traditional transatlantic allies.