Jean-Frédéric Morin

Laval University | ULAVAL · Department of Political Science

"This study argues that ‘regime complexes’ and ‘policy coherence’ are two faces of the same integrative process. The development of regime complexes co-evolves with the pressures on decision makers to coordinate their policies in various issue-areas. Conceptually, we introduce a typology of policy coherency (erratic, strategic, functionalistic, and...

The global intellectual property (IP) regime is in the midst of a paradigm shift in favor of greater access to protected work. Current explanations of this paradigm shift emphasize the agency of transnational advocacy networks, but ignore the role of academics. Scholars interested by global IP politics have failed to engage in reflexive thinking. B...

Why do some countries adopt exogenous rules into their domestic law when those laws do not align with the country's specific interests? This article draws on the policy diffusion literature to identify four causal mechanisms that are hypothesized to give rise to those transplants in the case of asymmetric interests. While the literature presents th...

Environment and trade are increasingly linked through preferential trade agreements. Despite the encompassing nature of environmental provisions in trade agreements, studies on causes and consequences of the trade and environment linkage are scarce. A main cause hindering research in this area is the lack of data. By dint of this research note we i...

Un manuel qui met l'accent sur les méthodes et méthodologies propres à la science politique, avec des conseils pratiques pour mener à bien un travail de recherche. Une initiation à la recherche en science politique à travers : une présentation pédagogique des méthodes de collecte et d’analyse des données des conseils pratiques pour mener à bien un...

Pandemics and environmental degradation are both deadly global crises, which often disproportionately impact the world’s most vulnerable populations. The scale of devastation for both pandemics and environmental problems can also be immense. The political science literature often assumes that policymakers rationally design governance systems accord...

Preferential trade agreements (PTAs) increasingly include environmental provisions. While the existing literature documents these provisions' environmental impacts, this paper sheds light on their relation with aid flows. Using an event-specification and data on bilateral Official Development Assistance (ODA) commitments for a sample of 147 develop...

The renegotiation of what US President Trump called “the worst trade deal ever” has resulted in the most detailed environmental chapter in any trade agreement in history. The United States–Mexico–Canada Agreement (USMCA) reaffirms the approach to environmental protection under the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), but also mentions dozen...

Promoting Intellectual property rights (IPRs) is a priority for the European Union and the United States. How have the EU and US pursued their strategies in the Asia-Pacific? This chapters compares their bilateral initiatives on IPRs across three strategies: treaty-making, coercion, and socialization. Through this analysis, we examine whether the E...

The existing literature underestimates the contribution of federated entities to international environmental agreements. This research note introduces a novel dataset on the role of federated entities in 2,077 environmental agreements. We demonstrate the value of this dataset by revisiting common assumptions that stem from the literature. According...

This paper investigates linkages between trade and climate policies by examining commitments made in preferential trade agreements (PTAs) and Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) under the Paris Agreement. While environmental protection and economic growth are often perceived as conflicting policy goals, PTAs and NDCs have the potential to en...

Global governance consists of elementary regimes that form regime complexes, which in turn give rise to what we call superclusters around broad policy domains. In recent years, scholars have explored what these macroscopic structures look like and how they evolve over time. Yet the complex ways in which entire governance superclusters interact and...

Negotiating parties to an environmental agreement can manage uncertainty by including flexibility clauses, such as escape and withdrawal clauses. This article investigates a type of uncertainty so far overlooked by the literature: the uncertainty generated by the creation of a Conference of the Parties (COP) in a context of sharp power asymmetry. W...

The Earth’s orbital space is increasingly threatened by debris. It is frequently described as a common-pool resource vulnerable to a ‘tragedy of the commons’ scenario. Scholars have suggested ambitious policy proposals to tackle the tragedy of space debris and assure the sustainability of the Earth’s orbits. Their proposals can be classified into t...

Research Methods in the Social Sciences is a comprehensive yet compact A-Z for undergraduate and postgraduate students undertaking qualitative and quantitative research across the social sciences, featuring 71 entries that cover a wide range of concepts, methods, and theories. * Covers quantitative and qualitative methods, with an emphasis on apply...

This chapter reviews this literature on environmental regime complexes. The first section clarifies the definition of regime complex and distinguishes it from similar concepts. The following three sections look respectively at the emergence, the development, and the consequences of regime complexes. The fifth section surveys the different methods u...

Intellectual property rights (IPRs) have been a priority for the European Union and the United States. However, over the past two decades, the EU and US have failed to advance their preferred IPRs standards through multilateral forums and have pursued bilateral alternatives instead. How have the EU and US pursued their strategies in this fragmented...

The chapter presents the concepts of biodiversity conservation and preservation.

This chapter presents the concept of international regime in global environmental politics

This chapter presents the concept of sovereignty in global environmental governance.

Aligning global governance to the challenges of sustainability is one of the most urgent international issues to be addressed. This book is a timely and up-to-date compilation of the main pieces of the global environmental governance puzzle. Essential Concepts of Global Environmental Governance synthesizes writing from an internationally diverse r...

This chapter explores the ideas and debates which shape global environmental politics. At least three types of socially constructed ideas play a key role in international environmental governance: world views, causal beliefs, and social norms. However, ideas are not universally shared, which means that ideological clashes are a feature of global en...

This chapter examines how states have very different preferences in global environmental politics. These state preferences are formed and shaped in a co-evolving process at both the domestic and international levels. Domestically, a rational choice analysis shows how environmental vulnerability and the costs of abatement contribute to defining a st...

This chapter discusses the complex and multifaceted relationship between science and politics. Although science and politics each follow a distinct logic and pursue distinct objectives, they are inextricably connected to one another. On the one hand, science influences political debates, by drawing attention to certain problems and providing necess...

This chapter focuses on non-state actors in global environmental governance. Non-state actors, such as non-governmental organisations (NGOs), corporations, and transnational networks, play an increasingly significant role in global environmental politics. Some of them, such as Greenpeace and Shell, became well known by communicating directly with t...

This chapter addresses environmental protection and economic development. These two policy objectives are at once contradictory and complementary; they cannot be considered separately as one necessarily affects the other. The chapter adopts a historical approach and studies how interactions between these two policy objectives have been understood s...

This chapter looks at intergovernmental organisations and international regimes. As several environmental problems have transnational implications, governments have been eager to establish international institutions to address these problems collectively. In the aftermath of the landmark 1972 Stockholm Summit on the Human Environment, states create...

This chapter assesses the rights governing access to globally shared natural resources, such as fish stocks, deep seabed minerals, and clean air. The international system is based on the principle of national sovereignty, which says that each state has absolute, perpetual, and exclusive rights within its national territory. This construction does n...

This chapter discusses the relationship between the environment and security. The concept of ‘environmental security’ is omnipresent, but is nonetheless ambiguous and contested. What exactly needs to be secured, and what are the security threats? Is environmental security about state security, faced with the loss of natural resources? Or is it abou...

This chapter explores the complex and multifaceted relationship between international trade and environmental protection. The global trade regime's normative principles, legal rules, and real-world consequences often contradict environmental governance. For example, there is tension between trade and environmental governance with respect to the com...

This chapter introduces several debates surrounding the effectiveness of global environmental governance. These debates are closely linked to the choice of policy instruments states make within international regimes. These public policy instruments include regulations, administrative standards, scientific indicators, financial targets, and accounti...

When do parties introduce novel clauses to a system of contracts or treaties? While important research has investigated how clauses diffuse once introduced, few empirical studies address their initial introduction. Drawing on network theory, this paper argues that novel clauses are introduced when agreements are concluded in certain structures of e...

Initiated in 2002, the International Environmental Agreements Data Base (IEADB) catalogs the texts, memberships, and design features of over 3,000 multilateral and bilateral environmental agreements. Using IEADB data, we create a comprehensive review of the evolution of international environmental law, including how the number, subjects, and state...

Environmental provisions in preferential trade agreements (PTAs) are increasing in terms of their number and variety. The economic effects of these environmental provisions remain largely unclear. It is, therefore, necessary to determine whether the trend to incorporate environmental provisions in PTAs counteracts the goal to spur economic developm...

The international community has acknowledged that international trade can be an effective means of helping to achieve the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and its 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Traditionally, preferential trade agreements (PTAs) were designed to promote trade flows. PTAs have become more comprehensive and now also...

When international organizations expand and proliferate, why do they fail to spread more evenly in their policy sphere? To answer this question, this article builds on organizational ecology theory, which was recently introduced into the study of international organizations. However, rather than studying each population separately, as previous stud...

As trade negotiations within the World Trade Organization seem permanently stalled, countries turn increasingly to preferential trade agreements (PTAs) between smaller groups of nations. Many of these PTAs incorporate environmental provisions, some of which require trading partners to enact new domestic environmental laws, and use the enforcement m...

Global Environmental Politics provides a comprehensive introduction to the key concepts, theories, methods, and debates in environmental politics. The authors' analytical approach encourages students to critique a wide variety of political perspectives, equipping them with the necessary tools to develop their own arguments and opinions. Adopts an...

The increasing uptake of environmental provisions in preferential trade agreements (PTAs) is well documented, but little is known about why countries prefer certain types of provisions over others. Exploiting a fine-grained dataset on environmental provisions in PTAs and hypothesizing that environmental provisions are more likely to be adopted when...

The prolific literature on the relationship between the trade and environmental regimes suffers from three shortcomings. First, it myopically focuses on multilateral institutions while the vast majority of trade and environmental agreements are bilateral. Second, when studies consider preferential trade agreements’ (PTAs) environmental provisions,...

While thousands of environment-related treaties have been concluded, it remains unclear whether they have been implemented. This paper investigates the relationship between the conclusion of treaties, namely international environmental agreements (IEAs) and preferential trade agreements (PTAs) that include environmental provisions, and the adoption...

The Shifting Landscape of Global Trade Governance - edited by Manfred Elsig August 2019

The renegotiation of what US President Trump called “the worst trade deal ever” has resulted in the most detailed environmental chapter in any trade agreement in history. The USMCA mentions dozens of environmental issues that its predecessor, the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), overlooked, and in line with contemporary US practice, bri...

Background: Recent work in international relations theory argues that international regimes do not develop in isolation, as previously assumed, but evolve as open systems that interact with other regimes. The implications of this insight's for sustainable development remains underexplored. Even thought environmental protection and health promotion...

→ No fewer than 107 preferential trade agreements (PTAs) include provisions on copyright protection. → Some PTAs refer to multilateral copyright agreements or replicate their requirements, but an increasing share of them also provide obligations that go beyond multilateral requirements. → The most active proponents of copyright provisions in PTAs a...

Most recent preferential trade agreements (PTAs) include environmental provisions. While a number of these environmental provisions remain rare and are incorporated in just a few PTAs, others are widely popular and are duplicated in more than 100 PTAs. We still lack a convincing explanation for this varying frequency. While the diffusion literature...

This article introduces a new dataset on the intellectual property (IP) provisions included in preferential trade agreements (PTAs) and makes it available for research and policy communities alike. Several PTAs include IP commitments that go well beyond the Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPs). A sound knowledg...

The Group of Seven (G7) leaders met for their 44th annual summit in Charlevoix, Canada in June 2018. Although the G7 has outlived many institutions of global governance, perennial doubts are cast upon it, particularly regarding its legitimacy and achievements. The Think 7/Idées 7 is a group of 35 scholars from all over the world who met from 21 to...

This collection of essays brings together scholars from various disciplinary backgrounds, based on three continents, with different theoretical and methodological interests but all active on the topic of complex systems as applied to international relations. They investigate how complex systems have been and can be applied in practice and what diff...

Bilateral and regional trade deals frequently include patent provisions that go beyond the minimum requirement of the multilateral Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS). They extend the scope of patentability and provide additional rights to patent holders. This paper systematically maps these “TRIPS-plus” agree...

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. This assumption leads several experts to argue in...

Foreign policy decisions are always made within an institutional framework, which shapes actors’ preferences and behavior. This is one of FPA’s most firmly established observations. Since the emergence of neo-institutionalism in the 1980s, the very notion of political institution has broadened. It is no longer merely limited to the constitutional r...

How useful is the individual level of analysis in understanding foreign policy? This is a legitimate question since there is still controversy surrounding the use of this unit of analysis. With the behavioral revolution in the 1960s, internationalists abandoned the study of “great men”. Kenneth Waltz was the first to acknowledge that heads of state...

Most of the key notions of contemporary FPA actually emerged over half a century ago. The jargon has changed, the case studies are different and the methods are more sophisticated, but the fundamental conclusions remain much the same. That does not mean that FPA has stagnated for half a century. On the contrary, after its development in the 1960s a...

What is a policy and when does a policy become foreign? This introductory chapter defines foreign policy analysis (FPA). At the crossroads between the theories of international relations and public policy analysis, FPA draws on multiple disciplines. Few fields of study have embraced disciplines as varied as sociology, economics, public administrati...

Various social actors influence or seek to influence foreign policy. NGOs, companies, the media, ethnic groups, unions and experts all exert a degree of pressure on the government. They also interact—exchanging information, setting up coalitions and continually adapting to their environment. The government does not simply listen passively to their...

Theories focusing exclusively on the macroscopic scale of analysis emerged in the 1970s. These theories assign a dominant role to the structure of the international system, which is viewed as an autonomous and regulatory body. They maintain that the state is so entrenched in this international structure and in the organizing principles of internati...

This chapter focuses on an essential prerequisite for every FPA, namely, identifying a foreign policy so that it can be grasped and explained. This stage is often neglected and constitutes the Achilles’ heel of several studies, which are so preoccupied with the decision-making process that they overlook the foreign policy itself. Yet, it is crucial...

In modern democracies, the bureaucracy is supposed to remain politically neutral and ensure that government decisions are implemented. In reality, the relationships between bureaucrats and political leaders are not always clear-cut. Moreover, the institutional design of the bureaucracy can greatly affect foreign policy. The bureaucracy’s principal...

A number of analysts saw the emergence of the constructivist movement in the 1990s as the return of the cultural dimension to the study of international relations. In reality, FPA has always been interested in culture. Several researchers devoted their entire careers to studying the role of identities, discourses, norms and cultural practices in fo...

Rationality is a key concept in all fields of social science. The rationalist paradigm provides an illusion of control, which may partly explain why it is so deep-rooted. The claim that actors behave rationally suggests that their behavior follows certain patterns and can be explained by an outside observer or even modeled, predicted and manipulate...

This book presents the evolution of the field of foreign policy analysis and explains the theories that have structured research in this area over the last 50 years. It provides the essentials of emerging theoretical trends, data and methodological pitfalls and major case-studies and is designed to be a key entry point for graduate students, upper-...

The regulatory contribution that preferential trade agreements (PTAs) make to global climate governance is assessed through an analysis of climate-related provisions found in 688 PTAs signed between 1947 and 2016. Provisions are analyzed along four dimensions: innovation, legalization, replication, and distribution. Innovative climate provisions ar...

The United States (US) and the European Union (EU) include several environmental clauses in their respective preferential trade agreements (PTAs). Building on an exhaustive and fine-grained dataset of PTAs environmental clauses, this article makes two contributions. First, it show that the US and the EU have initially favored different approaches t...

The 2009 Lisbon Treaty transferred the competence over Foreign Direct Investment policy from the national to the supranational level. This article analyses the impact of this transfer on the content of international investment agreements and, more broadly, the shape of the investment regime complex. Is the competence shift expected to have an indep...

Trade agreements contain an increasing number of environmental provisions. Some of these provisions now relate to precise environmental issues, such as biodiversity or hazardous waste management. Certain trade agreements even devote entire chapters to environmental protection. However, the rate of innovative environmental clauses per agreement has...

Regime complexes are arrays of institutions with partially overlapping mandates and memberships. As tensions frequently arise among these institutions, there is a growing interest geared to finding strategies to reduce them. Insights from regime theory, science and technology studies, and social network analysis support the claim that “boundary org...

Rising economies face a crucial dilemma when establishing their position on international patent law. Should they translate their increasing economic strength into political power to further developing countries’ interests in lower levels of international patent protection? Or, anticipating a rising domestic interest in stronger international paten...

While policymakers often make bold claims on the positive impact of intellectual property (IP) rights on both developed and developing country economies, the empirical literature is more ambiguous. IP rights have both incentive and inhibitory effects that are difficult to isolate in the abstract and dependent on economic context. To unravel these c...

While the trade regime is often analyzed under the metaphoric assumptions of Newtonian mechanics, we propose an alternative, more organic representation. We argue that the trade regime seems to evolve as a complex adaptive system, at the edge of order and chaos. Drawing from a dataset of 280 different types of environmental provisions found in 680...

The 2009 Lisbon Treaty transferred the competence over Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) policy from the national to the supranational level. This article analyses the impact of this transfer on the content of international investment agreements and, more broadly, the shape of the investment regime complex. Is the competence shift expected to have an...

This article synthesizes the results of two quantitative analyses, one at a macro and the second at a micro level, to shed light on the process of international socialization. The first analysis examines the seeming adoption of intellectual property norms at the state level while the second looks at the internalization of similar norms at the indiv...

Manuel mettant en évidence les méthodes et méthodologies propres à la science politique, avec des conseils pratiques pour mener à bien un travail de recherche. Une initiation à la recherche en science politique à travers : - des conseils pratiques pour mener à bien un travail de recherche - une présentation pédagogique des méthodes de collecte e...

Regime complexes are arrays of institutions with partially overlapping mandates and memberships. As tensions frequently arise among these institutions, there is a growing interest geared to finding strategies to reduce them. Insights from regime theory, science and technology studies, and social network analysis support the claim that “boundary org...

This book examines recent developments in political science research. What are the new influences to which the discipline opens itself up? Is political science research converging towards a single model or splitting into different streams? What are the new challenges at the beginning of the 21st century? By addressing these questions, this collecti...