Environmental Provisions and the Greening of Trade Agreements. A Text Reuse Approach to the Study of Policy Integration.

Preferential Trade Agreements (PTA) as key institution in trade governance are critical to understand the policy integration of human rights and environment in trade. Not only have PTAs proliferated and deepened in scope but also non-trade provisions: More trade agreements are containing environmental provisions, and each trade agreement is containing more environmental provisions (Brandi et al 2020). Despite this proliferation, there are competing hypothesis about the policy integration in preferential trade agreements along two cleavages: Whereas Jinnah & Morin (2020) argue that environmental integration in trade agreements is possible if well designed, Borchert et al. (2021) do see more potential in unilateral trade instruments. Considering actual effects, Ferrari et al. (2021) do not find a systematic positive effect of integration, whereas Martinez-Zarzoso (2018) and Abman et al. (2021) associate positive environmental outcomes with the integration of environmental provisions in trade agreements. This study investigates how EU environmental provisions are integrated into trade agreements. The first sub-question looks at the trade agreements with EU participation: how have EU environmental provisions evolved over time in EU trade agreements? The second sub-question looks trade agreements without EU participation: how have EU environmental provisions spread to non-EU trade agreements. The theoretical framework builds on the theories of external governance (Lavenex and Schimmelfennig 2009) and policy integration (Jordan & Lenschow 2010) to grasp the phenomenon of environmental provisions in trade agreements. It then distinguishes between policy transfer along trade agreements (Dolowitz and Marsh 1996) and policy diffusion as across trade agreements (Elkins and Simmons 2005). Drawing on recent developments in the field of text mining and first applications on PTAs (Alschner et al. 2017), the text of environmental provisions is analyzed with text similarity measures to see where text is reused. Data is derived from the Trade and Environment Database (Morin et al 2018), which collects 308 environmental provisions in 630 trade agreements from 1947 to 2016. The findings show not only how environmental provisions are integrated into trade agreements with and without EU participation but also to what extent environmental provisions spread by transfer or diffusion. The contribution of this study to the debate on policy integration of human rights and the environment in global sustainability governance is threefold: Firstly, it shows for the EU as major actor in trade and environmental politics how trade agreements integrate EU environmental provisions. A similar study has been provided so far by Jinnah & Morin (2020) for the US. Secondly, it specifies the channel of how environmental provisions spread by differentiating between policy transfer and policy diffusion. This matters to see whether uncoordinated but interdependent behavior like learning, adaption or copy-pasting takes place, like suggested by Allee & Elsig (2019). Thirdly, it tests text similarity and text reuse as methodological approach to the field of policy integration in trade and environment, which can then be extended to fields of integration.