The ability of multilateral environmental agreements (MEAs) to keep pace with their changing circumstances is crucial for a more effective global environmental governance. Yet, we know little about how new institutional design features are taken up by MEAs, allowing them to evolve over time. Building upon Kingdon’s (1984) multiple streams theory, I conceive the development of new institutional design features as the association between streams of problems, solutions, and political receptivity at critical moments. I apply this framework to two features introduced within the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD) framework and find that the main design entrepreneurs were the UNCCD Secretariat and independent scientists. The article provides important insight into characteristics that can make MEAs more adaptive. Namely, treaty bodies able to generate feedback about problems, push for solutions, and provide windows of opportunity for advocates to present and revise their proposals were found critical to the development of new design features.

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, they are often limited to US and EU agreements. Third, it examines how the trade and environmental regimes negatively affect each other, leaving aside their potential synergies. Conversely, this article assesses the potential contribution of PTAs to international environmental law. Several PTAs include a full-fledged chapter devoted to environmental protection and contain detailed commitments on various environmental issue areas. One possible scenario is that countries that are dissatisfied with traditional settings for environmental lawmaking engage in a process of “regime shifting” toward PTAs to move forward on their environmental agenda. The alternative is that PTAs’ environmental provisions are the result of “tactical linkages” and merely duplicate extant obligations from international environmental law to serve political goals. We shed light on this question by building on two datasets of 690 PTAs and 2343 environmental treaties. We investigate four potential contributions of PTAs to environmental law: the diffusion of multilateral environmental agreements (MEAs), the diffusion of existing environmental rules, the design of new environmental rules, and the legal prevalence of MEAs. The article concludes that the contribution of PTAs to the strengthening of states’ commitments under international environmental law is very modest on the four dimensions examined.

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