Beyond Borrowing: The Political Economy of Rule Strategies

International actors increasingly use rules produced by international organizations (IOs) by copying, modifying, or upgrading them into domestic and regional policies and laws. Existing research explains such rule borrowing largely through learning and competence across policy areas. However, there is still an underexplained pattern: in some domains, actors continue to adapt international rules (such as Basel banking rules), despite persistent criticisms that the rules failed; in other domains, where agendas are increasingly geopoliticized, actors often pursue autonomous rule creation rather than relying on external rules (as in the EU’s Critical Raw Materials Act). We lack a unified account of why these contrasting rule strategies occur across domains. Hence, this project asks: why do actors continue to borrow and adapt contested international rules in some domains, while in others shaped by geopoliticized issue linkage they build their own rules, and how do outcomes of these strategies differ? I address this question through two tracks: rule borrowing and rule creation. In the rule borrowing track, I will explain 1) why the EU continues to adapt Basel rules into its laws and policies despite persistent debates about Basel’s effectiveness. In the same context, I will extend the analysis 2) to BCBS (The Basel Committee on Banking Supervision) member states, asking why they adapt Basel rules. I will also examine 3) the consequences of rule borrowing for these actors. In the rule creation track, the project focuses on critical raw materials (CRM) as a geopoliticized agenda linking multiple policy areas (economic policy, security, and energy transition). I will explain 4) how energy- and resource-relevant IOs (e.g., IEA, IAEA, WTO, and others) respond to CRM geopolitics. I will also ask 5) under what conditions the EU builds its own rules for CRM. Then, I will analyze 6) how differently the EU’s member states comply with the EU’s CRM Act. Empirically, the project combines (i) text-based measures of IO rule incorporation in EU legal acts from an original EUR-Lex dataset, (ii) country-level BCBS implementation data on Basel adoption over time, (iii) the texts of the EU’s CRM Act and member-state indicators of policy action, and (iv) a corpus of policy documents from energy- and resource-relevant IOs. The project contributes to IO and international political economy (IPE) scholarship on rule-making and compliance.