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-level undergraduates and scholars into the discipline. The volume features an eclectic panorama of different conceptual, theoretical and methodological approaches to foreign political analysis, focusing on different models of analysis such as two-level game analysis, bureaucratic politics, strategic culture, cybernetics, poliheuristic analysis, cognitive mapping, gender studies, groupthink and the systemic sources of foreign policy. The authors also clarify conceptual notions such as doctrines, ideologies and national interest, through the lenses of foreign policy analysis.

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Controverses scientifiques, sommets mondiaux, débats Nord/Sud, mouvements sociaux, équité intergénérationnelle, efficacité de la coopération, etc. La politique internationale de l'environnement constitue un domaine foisonnant qui ne cesse de s'enrichir depuis la fin du XXe siècle. Ce manuel permet de s’initier et de mieux comprendre les débats qui animent les spécialistes de la gouvernance internationale de l’environnement. Les changements climatiques sont-ils des facteurs de déclenchement de conflits armés ? La coopération multilatérale doit-elle être considérée comme un échec ? Les firmes transnationales peuvent-elles devenir les alliées des ONG ? La souveraineté nationale est-elle un obstacle à la coopération internationale dans le domaine de l’environnement ? Résolument pédagogique, il favorise la compréhension de concepts et de réalités complexes en proposant des tableaux, des cartes, des diagrammes, des repères chronologiques, des encadrés, un lexique et des liens vers des ressources spécialisées.

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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 collection of essays discusses three interrelated topics: the relationship between political science and the problems of politics, the relationship between political science and other fields of research, and the transformation of the profession. In so doing, this volume traces the major trends in contemporary political science research since the end of the Cold War.

As part of this approach, the authors rely on the academic journals as a field of investigation. Each of the eight chapters focuses on a different journal, including the American Political Science Review,West European Politics, the British Political Science Review, Security Dialogue, the Journal of Common Market Studies, International Security, Electoral Studies and the Revue française de science politique.

The book is intended to scholars with an interest in the historiography of political science, the epistemology of knowledge, the sociology of the profession as well as the evolution of the field in terms of research agendas, theoretical approaches and methodological debates. 

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"This volume provides an essential glossary of critical terms and concepts in the field of international environmental politics for diplomats, analysts and students. The interdisciplinary array of expert authors provide terse and authoritative overview of the key concepts and debates that have defined the field of international environmental governance over the years. The entries carefully survey the intellectual ecosystem of the concepts applied to understanding and managing our global environmental crisis."

    –  Peter M. Haas, Professor of Political Science, University of Massachusetts Amherst, USA

"In a truly unique way, this book helps to connect the dots and navigate between the concepts, ideas and schools of thought in global environmental policy today. As environmental issues climb higher on the global agenda, I would highly recommend this book to all who wish to better understand the insights of sustainable global governance." 

     – Connie Hedegaard, European Union Commissioner for Climate Action

"The global community is at a crossroads in respect to addressing climate change. A solid understanding of global environmental governance empowers people to better shape positive democracy that determines a safer future. This book makes a valuable contribution to societal understanding and societal change. Those who care about the world we leave to our children should take inspiration from its many and varied contributors drawn from so many disparate but interlocking disciplines."

     – Christiana Figueres, Executive Secretary, United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change

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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 encourage mutually supportive approaches to climate and trade governance. Building upon three recent datasets, the paper locates a sample of 21 countries in a typology of four issue-linkage strategies across both types of instruments: policy integration, policy silos, asymmetry in favor of trade policy, and asymmetry in favor of climate policy. It finds that countries that reveal a preference for strong linkage with climate in their PTAs typically do not reveal a preference for strong trade linkage in their NDCs, and vice versa. No state from the sample favors strong policy integration. After sketching out possible explanations for this observation, the paper concludes that policy-makers have significant room for enhancing synergies between trade and climate commitments and that scholars have a role to play in this endeavor.  

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Next to artificial intelligence and big data, blockchains have emerged as one of the most oft-cited technologies associated with the digital economy. Leading technology companies have recently contributed to making the technology used more widely by developing integrated blockchain offerings. The emergence of such services yet strikingly clashes with the original stated goal of the technology to remove any form of central political authority, such as the one companies behind these new services can represent. How should we then understand the embrace of blockchains by companies that this technology was notably supposed to displace? Using the concept of infrastructure from Science and Technology Studies, we argue that these companies are not merely adopting the technology but actively promoting a new assemblage of socio-technical devices to reassert their authority over how information is exchanged online. Based on a comparative analysis of the technical documentation of Ethereum and Amazon Web Services (AWS) blockchain services, we highlight how actors contributing to building digital infrastructures regulate their users' behavior by affording them different capacities and constraints. We moreover show how by pursuing its commercial interest, AWS supported a corporate form of governance historically promoted by the United States to oversee the digital economy.

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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 (COPs) in a context of sharp power asymmetry. When negotiating an agreement, it is difficult for powerful states to make a credible commitment to weaker states, whereby they will not abuse their power to influence future COP decision-making. Flexibility clauses provide a solution to this credibility issue. They act as an insurance mechanism in case a powerful state hijack the COP. Thus, we expect that the creation of a collective body interacts with the degree of power asymmetry to make flexibility clauses more likely in environmental agreements. To test this argument, we draw on an original dataset of several specific clauses in 2,090 environmental agreements, signed between 1945 and 2018. The results support our hypothesis and suggest that flexibility clauses are an important design feature of adaptive environmental agreements.

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Intellectual property rights (IPRs) have been a priority for the European Union (EU) and the United States (US). However, over the past two decades, the EU and US have failed to advance their preferred IPR standards through multilateral forums and have pursued bilateral alternatives instead. How have the EU and US pursued their strategies in this fragmented environment? Looking specifically at the Asia-Pacific, we compare their bilateral initiatives on IPR across three strategies: treaty-making, coercion and socialization. Through this analysis, we examine whether the EU and US’ bilateral actions indicate regulatory competition, coordination or replication. We find that the overall tendency has been towards replication, which raises questions about the reasons for this redundancy and its policy consequences. As the rise of bilateralism is not unique to IPR, our findings have implications for global governance more generally.

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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 studies have done, this article investigates how distinct populations with overlapping niches shape each other’s evolution. It argues that when inter-population competition occurs, the first population to occupy its niche at a high density limits the long-term development of other populations. This is the case even if emerging populations may temporarily enjoy a higher growth rate. The argument is illustrated by a study of the relations between four populations of technical assistance providers in the field of intellectual property. By doing so, the article brings for the first time inter-population relations in the study of international organizations and provides an explanation for the persistent concentration of international organizations in specific areas of the governance space.

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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 development through trade via these PTAs. This is the first article in which the trade effects of environmental provisions in PTAs are thoroughly investigated. The spotlight is put on developing countries for which the assumed trade-off between economic development and environmental protection is particularly acute. This article uses a new fine-grained dataset on a broad range of environmental provisions in 680 PTAs, combined with a panel of worldwide bilateral trade flows from 1984 to 2016. We show that environmental provisions can help reduce dirty exports and increase green exports from developing countries. This effect is particularly pronounced in developing countries with stringent environmental regulations. By investigating how environmental provisions in PTAs affect trade flows, this article contributes to the literature on the following topics: international trade and the environment; design and impacts of trade agreements; and greening the economy in developing countries. It also shows that the design of trade agreements matters. Environmental provisions can be used as targeted policy tools to promote the green transformation and to leverage synergies between the economic and environmental effects of including environmental provisions in trade agreements.

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Initiated in 2002, the International Environmental Agreements Data Base (IEADB) currently contains information on over 3,000 multilateral and bilateral environmental agreements, including their full texts, membership actions, and design attributes. IEADB data allows us to produce a more detailed, comprehensive, and accurate description of the evolution of international environmental law than was previously possible, including the number, subjects, and memberships of IEAs that states have negotiated. The IEADB makes full texts of large numbers of IEAs available in ways that allow better typologies of how IEA designs vary and facilitates the coding of IEAs into those categories. We highlight the considerable scholarship that already has used the IEADB to contribute insights into international environmental governance and institutional design, including research on IEA membership, formation, and design as well as the structure of international environmental law generally. We briefly note the pedagogic value of the IEADB as a means to support both undergraduate and graduate teaching and research. We end by identifying broad research realms and specific research questions that are opened up by the particular structure and content of the IEADB, noting ways that scholars can use the IEADB to answer those questions of greatest interest to them.Initiated in 2002, the International Environmental Agreements Data Base (IEADB) currently contains information on over 3,000 multilateral and bilateral environmental agreements, including their full texts, membership actions, and design attributes. IEADB data allows us to produce a more detailed, comprehensive, and accurate description of the evolution of international environmental law than was previously possible, including the number, subjects, and memberships of IEAs that states have negotiated. The IEADB makes full texts of large numbers of IEAs available in ways that allow better typologies of how IEA designs vary and facilitates the coding of IEAs into those categories. We highlight the considerable scholarship that already has used the IEADB to contribute insights into international environmental governance and institutional design, including research on IEA membership, formation, and design as well as the structure of international environmental law generally. We briefly note the pedagogic value of the IEADB as a means to support both undergraduate and graduate teaching and research. We end by identifying broad research realms and specific research questions that are opened up by the particular structure and content of the IEADB, noting ways that scholars can use the IEADB to answer those questions of greatest interest to them.

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Few studies have examined transnational actors involved in global adaptation governance, despite their growing influence. This paper focuses on 100 Resilient Cities (100RC), a transnational municipal network (TMN) that has created governance instruments with potential for contributing to global adaptation governance. Despite their different nature from international actors (states and intergovernmental organizations), the distinct practices of TMNs and how they might influence global adaptation governance are uncertain. Vague claims suggest that TMNs are innovative, but what this innovation consists of remains unclear. Therefore, the research question here is: how do TMNs innovate in global adaptation governance? This paper strives to answer this question, by building an analytical framework to identify types and features of governance instruments, based on the literature on policy instruments, global environmental governance and global climate governance. It presents a case study of 100RC, based on an in-depth documentary analysis and semi-structured interviews. The results suggest that TMNs can be innovative, if they, like 100RC, create original governance instruments instead of using the existing tools of international or other transnational actors. While some of 100RC’s tools favour a more recent, soft and indirect approach, its considerable use of hard practices with significant obligation is particularly interesting considering the general characterization of TMNs as voluntary and soft. The governance practices of 100RC are thus not in stark contrast with those of international actors. Their diversity could provide inspiration for future action to improve the effectiveness of global climate adaptation governance, and the analytical framework developed here could be applied in further studies.

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In recent years, jurisdictions have struggled to address the emergence of ‘sharing’ businesses, such as Uber. These businesses have used technology to avoid the regulations that usually apply to industries such as taxis. By applying a historical institutionalist analysis, this article explains how authorities have responded to these companies. Through a detailed case study of Uber the article makes an empirical contribution by illustrating how regulatory regimes have responded to ‘disruptive’ technology. Furthermore, by applying an exogenously induced and endogenously mitigated model of change the article addresses the bifurcation in historical institutionalist literature between exogenous and endogenous accounts of change. This helps develop historical institutionalism theoretically, responds to criticisms of agent-based approaches and advances a model that can be applied to the study of technological change more generally.

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The internet industry has emerged as an important economic and political actor, both within the United States and internationally. Internet companies depend on exceptions from copyright law in order to operate. As a result, internet companies have considerable incentive to try and influence international copyright law. However, the current literature has neglected the role of the internet industry, instead focusing on the influence of copyright owning media companies. By doing so the literature has largely homogenized the concerns of business interests, neglecting the interests of business actors which do not favor stricter copyright protection. By examining business conflict over recent copyright initiatives by the United States, this article criticizes the literature. It illustrates that the internet industry has been able to alter the negotiating preferences of the United States against the wishes of copyright owners. This argues against the homogenization of business interests regarding copyright whilst illustrating the importance of material over discursive factors in determining political outcomes.

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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 of domestic environmental legislations. Thanks to datasets that are significantly more comprehensive and fine-grained than those previously used, we can focus on the direct link to environmental legislations rather than the less direct link to environmental outcomes. We are also able to study the relationship between international obligations on specific environmental issue areas and legislation in the same issue areas. As expected, we find a significant and positive relationship between both IEAs and PTAs with domestic legislation. Moreover, the link between treaties and domestic legislation is more pronounced in developing countries and, in these countries, more pronounced before rather than after entry into force. This relationship can be observed for many specific environmental issue areas, but not all of them. These findings contribute to the literature on environmental regime effectiveness and the domestic impact of treaties.

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An increasingly comprehensive set of environmental provisions is being integrated in preferential trade agreements (PTAs). Interestingly, while a number of these environmental provisions are included only rarely, others are duplicated in more than 100 PTAs. We still lack a convincing explanation for the conditions that fuel the uptake of specific provisions. This paper contributes to the growing literature on the design, interaction, and diffusion of international institutions and introduces two key innovations. First, our level of analysis is the provision level rather than the agreement level. Second, while the diffusion literature typically tries to explain how diffusion occurs, we investigate what makes diffusion more likely. We hypothesise that the initial conditions – relating both to agency and institutional factors – under which provisions first emerge determine the scope of their diffusion. Our results indicate that provisions originating from intercontinental agreements diffuse more often, and provisions first introduced by environmentally credible countries are more frequently duplicated than provisions introduced by economically powerful countries.

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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 23 May, 2018 at Laval University, Quebec City to identify key themes to be addressed at the Charlevoix Summit, communicating its findings to the G7 leaders’ personal representatives. This Policy Insights paper builds on these discussions and looks ahead to the 2019 Biarritz Summit by making recommendations of how the G7 can play a leadership role. We argue that it should address new, unprecedented and highly disruptive issues that characterise our complex world, rather than well-understood international problems that fit into existing categories. We argue that the G7 can do this by playing to its strengths – informality and like-mindedness in particular – in addressing emerging and transversal issues such as Artificial Intelligence (AI) and cryptocurrencies.

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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 introduce an original dataset on environmental provisions found in 630 trade agreements signed between 1947 and 2016 – that is the most comprehensive in terms of both variables coded and agreements covered. We illustrate the dataset’s usefulness by assessing the question of why countries include environmental provisions in trade agreements. Are trade negotiations opportunities to promote stringent environmental standards? Or are environmental provisions window-dressing covering protectionist interests? We find evidence that democracies, countries that face import competition, and countries that care about the environment are more likely to include environmental provisions in trade agreements. The database is of particular relevance for research on international institutional design, policy innovation, regime complexity, policy diffusion, and regime effectiveness.

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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 patent protection, should they adopt a position that favors maximal patent protection? Drawing on multiple case studies using a most similar system design, we argue that rising economies, after having been coerced into adopting more stringent patent standards, tend to display ambivalent positions, trapped in bureaucratic politics and caught between conflicting domestic constituencies. We find that the recent proliferation of international institutions and the expansion of transnational networks have contributed to fragmentation and polarization in domestic patent politics. As a result, today’s emerging economies experience a more tortuous transformative process than did yesterday’s. This finding is of particular relevance for scholars studying rising powers, as well as for those working on policy diffusion, regulatory regimes, transnational networks and regime complexes.

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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 independent impact or simply reproduce and continue existing trends? Exploring these two conjectures through a combination of text analysis, primary materials, and interviews, we are making a Historical Institutionalist argument focusing on the timing and sequencing of international investment negotiations. While the competence shift has allowed the EU to innovate in developing its own approach to negotiating international investment agreements, notably with the proposal to create an Investment Court System, the novelty may be only at the surface as the constraints of past, current, and future negotiations restrict the options available to EU actors- we call this the space-time continuum. The result of this learning-and-reacting process is a new European approach which simultaneously duplicates and innovates and could eventually favour greater centralization within the investment regime complex.

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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 trade agreements, we show how both the trade regime and the norms contained therein unfold by remaining stable (but not static) and dynamic (but not chaotic). Trade negotiators simultaneously explore new grounds by introducing legal innovations and exploiting known territories by adopting existing norms. Our analysis suggests that, even as the regime grows in the number and length of agreements, there are exploratory and exploitative processes at work. These twin processes can explain that the trade regime appears neither more fragmented/heterogeneous nor more centralized/homogenous than it was fifty years ago, despite its substantial expansion. This hypothesis is at the core of the research agenda that this paper lays out.

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Cette recension croisée porte sur trois ouvrages publiés en 2015 sur la question des villes et de l'action climatique. Il met en avant le nouveau rôle des villes, tant au niveau local que transnational ou mondial, dans la lutte aux changements climatiques et évoque les perspectives pour le droit transnational de l'environnement.

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Le droit international des investissements a connu une évolution exponentielle au cours des deux dernières décennies. Avec plus de 3 000 accords et une vaste jurisprudence, certains qualifient ce système de chaotique et instable. Les divergences entre traités bilatéraux d’investissement et les décisions contraires de tribunaux arbitraux donnent certes cette impression. Le présent article sur le développement du modèle de négociation de la Commission européenne, après l’entrée en vigueur du Traité de Lisbonne, démontre néanmoins que tout en étant un système décentralisé et flexible, le régime des investissements est en réalité dynamiquement stable et favorise une répétition des normes préexistantes. Le chapitre sur l’investissement du récent accord économique et commercial global (AECG) illustre en effet que tout en ayant eu l’occasion d’innover, la Commission européenne s’est largement inspirée du complexe institutionnel en place incluant notamment, mais pas uniquement, le modèle d’accord des États-Unis.

Mots clés : Droit international des investissements, Union européenne, Institutions, Évolution juridique, systèmes complexes

Foreign investment law (FIL) went through a tremendous evolution in the past two decades. With more than 3 000 agreements and a large corpus of case-law, some would qualify it as a chaotic and unstable system. Divergences between agreements and past arbitral decisions undoubtedly strengthen this perception. Nonetheless, this article on the development of the new European model for negotiating investment agreements following the Lisbon Treaty outlines that FIL is dynamically stable over time. In other words, while being flexible and opened for incremental changes, the investment regime also fosters a repetition of pre-existing norms. In fact, the recent text of the investment chapter of the Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement (CETA) shows that even though the European Commission had the opportunity to innovate, the existing institutional complex surrounding FIL including, but not solely the American treaty model, largely inspired it.

Keywords : Foreign investment law, European Union, Institutions, Legal evolution, Complex system

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Why do some countries adopt exogenous rules into their domestic law when those lawsdo not align with the country’s specific interests? This article draws on the policydiffusion literature to identify four causal mechanisms that are hypothesized to give riseto those transplants in the case of asymmetric interests. While the literature presents thesemechanisms independently, this article argues that each works in combination with theothers to facilitate legal transplantation. The empirical demonstration is based on aquantitative analysis of legal transplants in the field of intellectual property (IP), andincorporates an original index of IP protection in 121 developing countries over 14 years. Our results suggest that, while one mechanism – coercion – is instrumental in initiatingthe transplantation process, it fades over time and is largely supplanted by three others:contractualization, socialization and regulatory competition acting in a mutuallysupportive manner. This article concludes with a plea for theoretical eclecticism,acknowledging multi-causality and context-conditionality. Any comprehensiveexplanation of legal transplantation must include the identification of mutualreinforcement between causal mechanisms, rather than simply ranking their relative contributions.

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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. Building on the results from a survey of 1,679 IP experts, this article argues that a community of academics successfully broke the policy monopoly of practitioners over IP expertise. They instilled some skepticism concerning the social and economic impacts of IP among their students as well as in the broader community of IP experts. They also provided expert knowledge that was widely amplified by NGOs and some intergovernmental organizations, acting as echo chambers to reach national decision makers. By making these claims, this article illustrates how epistemic communities actively collaborate with other transnational networks rather than competing with them, and how they can promote a paradigm change by generating rather than reducing uncertainty.

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This study argues that ‘regime complexes’ and ‘policy coherence’ are two faces of thesame integrative process. The development of regime complexes co-evolves with the pressureson decision makers to coordinate their policies in various issue-areas. Conceptually, we intro-duce a typology of policy coherency (erratic, strategic, functionalistic, and systemic) accordingto its procedural and substantive components. Empirically, by triangulating quantitative andqualitative data, we use this typology for the case of the genetic resources’ regime complex toillustrate the links between regime complexes and policy coherency. Our results suggest that acoherent policymaking process favours integrated regime complexes, while greater exposure toa regime complex increases the pressure to have a coherent policymaking. This study fills a gapin the literature on regime complexes by providing a micro-macro model linking structure toagency.

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The study of GEG can contribute toward debunking a persistent – but rarely explicit – myth, sometimes called the “linear model”  or the “rational instrumental approach”. According to this myth, expert knowledge – that encompasses but is not limited to scientific knowledge – should precede politics. As such, GEG has significant theoretical and policy contributions to offer to other subfields of IR, such as international political economy. Constructivist scholarship so rarely claims policy-relevance that it would be unfortunate not to pay attention.

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This paper offers a conceptual analysis of the negotiation of the Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement (CETA) between Canada and the European Union. It argues that traditional accounts of the structure of trade negotiations must be tailored for their novel nature, especially their wider scope on various regulatory issues and the relative economic weight symmetry of trading partners. To build our argument, we revisit traditional structural factors such as economic interdependence, non-agreement alternatives (NAA), institutional constraints, outcome valuations, and domestic support. We conclude that current and future bilateral trade negotiations will likely last longer, deadlocks will likely become more frequent, and that variations in scope will likely increase.

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Understanding the impact of regime complexes on global governance calls for creative policy thinking. This introduction provides a new and more precise definition of the concept of regime complex. It also suggests specific tools to characterize regime complexes and analyze their impacts on global governance. The articles in this issue deepen the analytical understanding of complexes by examining concrete examples in various domains of global governance such as piracy, taxation, energy, food security, emissions reduction, carbon sinks, biosafety, and refugee governance. In addition to providing an in-depth description of a variety of different regime complexes, this issue is innovative on three accounts: (1) it presents complexes as both barriers and opportunities for global governance and gives explanations for these diverse outcomes; (2) it shows how a broad spectrum of actors is necessary for understanding the creation and evolution of complexes; and (3) it qualifies former claims to the effect that only powerful actors can impact regime complexes. Keywords: regime complexes,networks, institutional centralization, institutional fragmentation, institutional density.

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Why and how do issues expire? This paper applies the concept of path dependency to issuelife cycle and argues that the manner in which an issue dies is closely associated with how it comes to life. This paper argues that, on the access to medicines issue, the first actors (1) to have called attention to a legal problem, (2) to have capitalised on the HIV/AIDs crisis, and (3) to have used the example of Africa, were also the first to have felt constrained by their own frame in their attempt to (1) look for economical rather than legal solutions, (2) expand the list of medicines covered beyond anti-AIDs drugs, and (3) allow large emerging economies to benefit from a scheme designed by countries without manufacturing capacities. In order to escape an issue in which they felt entrapped, issue entrepreneurs worked strategically to close the debate in order to better reframe it in other forums.

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While the WTO secretariat, key delegations, several NGOs, and industry publicly present the 30 August 2003 WTO Decision as an attempt to reconcile intellectual property with access to medicines, our research shows otherwise. We draw on qualitative analyses of 54 interviews and a lexicometric analysis of press releases to show that their enthusiastic public statements contrast deeply with their internal, cynical beliefs. Most of these actors not only consider the WTO Decision to be fundamentally flawed but claim to have known this prior to its adoption. We argue that a procedural norm of consensus-seeking impeded traditional bargaining over this sensitive issue and that distrust among participants hindered truthseeking deliberation. Caught between strategic and communicative actions, state and non state actors found themselves trapped in their own rhetoric of reconciling intellectual property with access to medicines. They realized that the appearance of a solution, rather than a functional solution, provided the only realistic outcome to a fruitless and publicly damaging continuation of debate. From a theoretical perspective, this case study sheds a new light on the gray zone between rational choice theory and constructivism, where both discourse and strategies matter. From an empirical perspective, it illustrates the risk of seeking consensus within international regimes when the procedural norm of consensus coexists with a high level of distrust.

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This paper examines the current wave of US bilateral agreements with respect to their strategic and political value at the plurilateral level. The US government has explicitly recognized its objective of leveraging bilateral agreements in order to influence regional and multilateral negotiations. Although it may be too early to assess the full effectiveness of this US strategy, the paper argues that there are clear signs that the exploitation of bilateral agreements will not independently achieve the goal of strengthening plurilateral patent norms. This finding is supported by an assessment of six potential roads from bilateralism to plurilateralism: chain reaction, pressure for inclusion, coalition building, emulation, legal interpretation, and adherence. The assertion that bilateral trade deals have a great impact on international patent lawmaking, made both by proponents and critics of TRIPs-Plus agreements, is unsubstantiated. The author concludes that the US Government Accountability Office and Congress are justified in questioning whether the negotiation of these bilateral agreements, at least in the realm of IP law, is a wise investment of US Trade Representative’s resources.

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Most efforts to negotiate a multilateral agreement on the liberalization and protection of investment have failed despite the fact that there are more than 2,400 bilateral investment treaties in existence. We have coined this phenomenon the “lateralism paradox.” Within this article, we consider five hypotheses that focus respectively on power asymmetries, incentives for defection, strategic linkages, domestic constraints, and ongoing adaptation. We found that the first four explanations are not supported by empirical evidence from the post-NAFTA period. We conclude that bilateralism appears to be the only feasible approach for negotiating investment rules, as well as the most sensible process to ensure continuous and dynamic adaptation.

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Twelve years after the inception of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), the US policy on the protection of foreign investment is evolving. This article compares the provisions on investment in the recent US free trade agreements (FTAs) and the 2004 model bilateral investment treaty (BIT) with NAFTA’s. While most of the provisions are similar, some differences can be identified, both in substantive and procedural forms. We explain this evolution by a learning process of the US administration from the NAFTA experience. We argue that the new features of the FTAs and of the revised model BIT result from the US interest in reaching a better balance between the protection of investment and the protection of state sovereignty. This American concern stems from a reaction to the claims filed by foreign investors under NAFTA Chapter 11, at least some of which were perceived as ‘frivolous’ by the US government. However, the recent US FTAs and model BIT do not reveal a thorough policy reorientation but rather adjustments to the policy at the basis of NAFTA’s investment chapter.

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Le droit international de la propriété intellectuelle impose de plus en plus la brevetabilité du matériel génétique. Plusieurs organisations non gouvernemen-tales et pays en développement s’opposent à cette extension du droit des brevetsen réclamant de nouveaux droits de propriété sur les ressources génétiques etles connaissances traditionnelles. La dernière version du projet de Zone de li- bre-échange des Amériques reflète cette polarisation et contient, à côté des dis-positions sur la brevetabilité des végétaux, des propositions sur la protection dela diversité biologique. Cette opposition démontre que les pays latino-américains ont appris à jouer un rôle proactif dans le régime international des brevets et tentent d’orienter les débats vers leurs préoccupations.

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Who regulates the global economy? This fundamental question has been puzzling many authors for quite some time now. As national and international markets get more integrated than ever, regulators all around the world are under increasing pressure to harmonize their regulations. The choice of the regulations around which they will is however not without consequences as it can have important distributive effects. The literature thus far has in the main analyzed this question by looking at the role of public actors. While recent work on the “Brussels’ effect” have highlighted that private actors can play a role in the export of European rules, the main explanatory variables of this approach remain attributes of the European Union (i.e. market size and regulatory capacity). As such, it does not really explain when and why private actors actually decide to actively promote rules created in a foreign jurisdiction. In this chapter, I argue that adopting a network approach can help fill this gap by giving more attention to the interactions between private actors. Looking at the case of data protection, I more precisely maintain that private regulatory networks involving both European and non-European private associations helped the EU export its rules across the Atlantic. While supportive of a functionalist extension explanation of how rules travel, I show that the EU also acted as a ‘classical foreign policy’ actor when it used its legal authority to shape the structure of the private regulatory network here at play.

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)  ere designed to promote trade flows. PTAs have become more comprehensive and now also cover non-economic policy areas, such as the environment. This chapter examines whether the inclusion of environmental provisions in PTAs changes the observed overall positive contribution that PTAs make to economic outcomes and thereby to the economic objectives of the SDGs. Specifically, we ask whether the inclusion of environmental provisions in PTAs reduces export flows between PTA partner countries. Using a novel data set on environmental provisions in PTAs, we estimate gravity type panel regressions. We find that membership in PTAs including more environmental provisions is associated with less trade among trade partners compared to PTAs that include less or no environmental provisions. This negative effect of environmental provisions is fully driven by the negative effect on South-North trade flows, i.e. exports from developing to high-income countries.

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Comparativists have long demonstrated that corporations are ‘produced’ through a process of national institutional embedding. However, the globalisation of markets is said to be creating global corporations that no longer have allegiance to their home states. They become as global in their outlook as their interests, and take on an increasingly autonomous existence that is both institutionally as well as physically disembedded from their home states.  In fact, they are seen as proactively attacking national institutional variations.  A key reason for this is that most major industry sectors are oligopolistic. Therefore, global corporations have come to control, rather than compete in, global as well as national markets. Freed from the both the ‘shackles’ of market competition and their home states’ institutions, the result produced is said to be a convergence on neoliberal policies, and a ‘race to the bottom’ as states compete to bid down social and environmental protections to serve the interests of highly mobile capital. The impacts are said to be felt universally, though most acutely in the case of institutionally weaker developing states.

Are the interests of global corporations as homogeneous as often claimed, and is the result the neoliberalization of developing states’ political economies? To consider these questions we look at the case of investment in South Africa by Ford and Volkswagen, two of the world’s major automotive corporations. Using insights from the comparative capitalism literature, an analysis of South Africa’s political economy, and a content analysis of these corporations’ reporting, we demonstrate that rather than abandoning the management-labor relations of their home states, these corporations have instead sought to retain them. In fact, they have attempted to reproduce their home states’ institutions in their South African operations. From a corporate perspective, their manufacturing operations in South Africa thus represent a case of proactive rather than passive institutional path dependence. From a South African perspective, the management-labor relations they have sought to establish reflect a process of attempted neo-colonisation, and resistance to it, as much as globalisation. The result is that as global corporations become physically disembedded from their home states when they invest and operate abroad, it does not necessarily follow that they become institutionally disembedded as well. Nor does it follow that the states in which they invest ‘surrender’ their institutional differences. As such, foreign investment is a medium for institutional competition between states, rather than annihilation. 

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Ce chapitre porte sur les liens entre l’analyse de la politique étrangère (APÉ) et les théories des relations internationales (RI). À travers une synthèse historique des moments forts qui ont animé ces champs d’études, ce chapitre fait la démonstration que si l’APÉ et les RI ont évolué en vase clos pendant quelques décennies, elles se sont considérablement rapprochées au cours des dernières années pour devenir des vases communiquants. Alors que la frontière entre ce qui est interne et externe à l’État est remise en question, il en va de même pour celle qui sépare l’APÉ des RI. Même si ces champs d’études ont longtemps entretenu une relation complexe due à l’absence de consensus sur leur démarcation, les échanges entre eux sont maintenant plus fructueux que jamais. C’est en combinant les théories de l’APÉ et celles des RI dans un bricolage théorique original que les chercheurs contemporains peuvent s’attaquer de la façon la plus fructueuse possible aux questions de notre époque.

La doctrine énoncée par Paul Gérin-Lajoie en avril 1965 n’a pas vocation à s’étendre au commerce international ni à la protection des investissements. En effet, la seule lecture de la Loi constitutionnelle de 1867 suffit pour convaincre qu’il est difficile de prétendre que ces deux domaines d’activité relèvent des compétences internes ou externes des provinces canadiennes. Pourtant, force est de constater que l’expansion qu’a connue l’activité internationale du Québec ces cinquante dernières années, conjuguée à l’élargissement des thèmes couverts par les accords d’intégration économique, a amené le Québec à jouer un rôle significatif dans les arènes économiques et commerciales internationales. Par le pouvoir de mise en œuvre du contenu des accords internationaux qui découle des compétences législatives qui lui appartiennent, le Québec a pu être impliqué à divers titres dans la négociation d’importants accords de partenariat économique tel que l’Accord économique et commercial global (AECG) signé entre le Canada et l’Union européenne. Le Québec fut aussi associé de près au règlement d’importants différends commerciaux auxquels le Canada était partie devant l’Organe de règlement des différends de l’Organisation mondiale du commerce ou devant des instances créées par l’ALENA. De la même façon, il fut consulté au premier chef dans le règlement de plaintes portées par des investisseurs étrangers dans le cadre d’arbitrages investisseur-État. L’activité internationale du Québec en matières économique et commerciale s’est aussi manifestée par la signature d’ententes intergouvernementales en matière de marchés publics ou pour la création d’un marché nord-américain du carbone. Le Québec a pu, au fil du temps, développer puis augmenter son influence sur l’élaboration et l’application des accords de commerce. Il est à souhaiter que les négociations du Partenariat transpacifique, pendant lesquelles les provinces canadiennes ont été largement reléguées aux coulisses, ne sont pas annonciatrices d’un recul à cet égard.

The doctrine Paul Gérin-Lajoie launched in April 1965 is not intended to extend to international trade nor to the protection of investments. Indeed, the reading of the 1867 Constitutional Act convinces its readers that it is difficult to claim that these two fields fall under the internal or external jurisdiction of the Canadian provinces. However, it must be recognized that the expansion of Quebec’s international activity during the past 50 years, combined with the broadening of the themes covered by economic integration agreements, have brought Quebec to play a significant role within the international economic and commercial arenas. Through its implementation powers for the contents of international agreements, derived from the legislative jurisdiction it holds, Quebec has been involved in numerous manners in the negotiation of important economic partnership agreements, such as theComprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement (CETA) signed between Canada and the European Union. Quebec was also closely involved in the resolution of important commercial disputes to which Canada was a party before the Dispute Settlement Body of the World Trade Organization or before bodies created under NAFTA. Similarly, the province was consulted for the resolution of complaints brought by foreign investors in the framework of investor-state arbitrations. Quebec’s international activity in economic and commercial matters has also manifested itself through the signature of intergovernmental agreements on public markets or the creation of a North American carbon market. Quebec has progressively developed and increased its influence on the elaboration and implementation of commercial agreements. Hopefully, the Trans-Pacific Partnership negotiations, during which Canadian provinces were largely relegated to the sidelines, do not herald a setback in this respect.

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In this essay, I advocate for the use of an integrated approach to study networks as both structures and actors. The study of networks has gained a lot of interest in global environmental governance studies and related fields. Witnessing transnational processes that might influence world politics, scholars have looked at a variety of phenomena, among which epistemic communities, transnational advocacy networks or public-private partnerships (Bouteligier 2013, Andonova et al. 2009, Keck and Sikkink 1998, Haas 1992, 1990). Recently, they have also applied the network lens to global environmental governance. However, there is still room for investigation. Indeed, scholars of global environmental governance have often thought of networks as structures (e.g. Bansard et al. 2016, Giest and Howlett 2013) or as actors (Hakelberg 2014, Andonova et al. 2009). Few studies have analysed them as both. How can an integrated perspective of networks as structures and actors improve our understanding of the influence of networks in earth system governance?

To answer this question, the example of Transnational Municipal Networks (TMNs) engaged in climate action proves interesting. As structures, TMNs influence the behaviour of their city members, guiding them toward climate action and resilience. Some cities find themselves in better positions than others in the network and become more powerful. As actors, TMNs develop strategies to gain weight in the system of global climate governance. I elaborate on the case of 100 Resilient Cities (100RC), a TMN founded in 2013 by The Rockefeller Foundation to work on urban resilience. In five years, 100RC has managed to become a prominent actor of the system. Inside its network of cities, it has oriented the behaviour of its members towards the design and implementation of resilience projects and the use of specific governance tools. Outside of it, it has partnered with major TMNs and non-TMN actors and become part of global initiatives dealing with climate action. To understand its rise, we must consider both the capacity of 100RC to connect to specific external actors and its internal structure of cities.

This essay thus joins the social sciences agent-structure debate by focusing on the integrated perspective of networks. Furthermore, it seeks to bring new insights on TMNs, a rather recent phenomenon whose influence we are still trying to measure. Finally, as it focuses on one entity of global climate governance, it hopes to offer an innovative contribution to questions dealing with agency and architectures of earth system governance.

Despite the global call for action, international actors have seemed unable to provide effective solutions to the ‘wicked problem’ of climate change. Overall, the global climate
governance system initiated at the end of the 1980s has hardly evolved and is often described as locked. Recently, however, distinct actors have started to offer new answers to the governing of climate. Among them, Transnational Municipal Networks (TMNs) claim that ‘while nations talk, cities act’ and promote the role of local actors at the global level. Although their direct effect on mitigation has been questioned, I argue that TMNs may have an indirect effect on the system through the creation of governance tools of new generation. This paper thus tackles the general question of how a system may change.
In that sense, I use a theoretical framework based on complexity approaches and network theory that gives an understanding of the emergence and diffusion of innovation. I
then conduct a case study of 100 Resilient Cities, a recent TMN that has rapidly become a central actor within the network of TMNs. Finally, I present some prospects of the emergence of these actors that lack legal authority and financial resources in global climate governance.

Over the last decades, the interest in networks in International Relations has dramatically increased. Witnessing a variety of transnational processes in world politics, scholars have studied epistemic communities, transnational advocacy networks or intergovernmental policy networks, among others. Recently, they have also applied the network lens to global climate governance, looking at different entities as structures or as actors. However, few studies have analysed them as both. This paper argues that networks can be seen simultaneously as constraining structures and purposeful and influential agents. In that sense, the case of Transnational Municipal Networks (TMNs) engaged in climate action proves interesting. As structures, TMNs successfully connect cities together and with other actors in complex arrangements where power logics are at play. As actors, they also develop strategies to reach and influence distinct international and transnational actors. The example of 100 Resilient Cities shows these processes result from well-thought strategies aimed at influencing global climate governance. It also underlines how the network as a whole affects its members which in turn shape it through their decisions and actions. Entering the agent-structure debate in an innovative way, this paper overall seeks to engage in a fruitful reflection on networks in IR.

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In this working paper, I analyse Transnational Municipal Networks (TMNs) as elements of the complex system of climate governance and assess their potential for innovation through the study of their governance instruments. Over the recent period, climate governance has experienced the rise of sub-state and non-state actors. Among them, TMNs, alliances cities create and or integrate to develop their climate action and be represented at the global scale, have received a lot of attention. Scholars have underlined their role in promoting local climate action and providing cities with cognitive, financial and political resources. They have also claimed their ability to bring innovation to climate governance by questioning who governs and how. Others imply that by combining institutional and market-based elements to elaborate and implement their actions, they generate a new system of governance from the middle. However, these efforts to examine the innovation role of TMNs need to be strengthened, considering the increasing complexity of the environment. More specifically, we must understand what TMNs do differently and how they may manage to change practices in the complex system of climate governance. To this end, this paper focuses on the governance instruments used by TMNs to steer their members towards climate action. Whereas states and intergovernmental organizations usually recur to regulatory and economic instruments, displaying a traditional vision of authority, TMNs seem to favour instruments based on nodal and organizational resources. In that sense, their steering would be softer and more indirect. The prospects of this innovation are then discussed to understand whether it might represent an effective alternative to the current managing of climate issues. Envisioning climate governance itself as a complex system, this paper analyses how change may emerge and diffuse in nonlinear ways to challenge dominant modes of governing. It will thus represent an interesting contribution to the discussion of the diverse strategies for effective environmental governance.

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Conference paper presented at the International Sociological Association RC52 Interim Conference, Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore, Milan, March 19-21, 2015.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the role played by professions and professionals in mediating the impact of technological change between the institutions of the state and market in both national and transnational domains. I challenge the idea of professions as a ‘third logic’ operating between states and markets by developing the concept of the policy arena – a site of professional interaction around the regulatory regimes that set the boundaries of states and markets. I draw on the concepts of institutional work, linked ecologies, and organizational fields to make the point. Following this, I consider how technological change, in the form of disruptive innovation, impacts the nature of professional interaction in policy arenas. I argue that technological change is an endogenous social process through which professionals challenge existing frames of issue areas and work tasks to their own advantage. This dynamic is important to understanding a number of regulatory puzzles, especially in the transnational domain. The investigation contributes to a closer union between international political economy and the sociology of professions. 

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Paper presented at GR:EEN Next Generation of Scholarship Conference. Global Re-ordering: Evolution through European Networks (GR:EEN FP7 Project).

This paper draws on the example of e-cigarette regulation in the European Union to introduce the concept of policy disruption. To do so, I make two analytical distinctions: first, between disruptive technologies and disruptive innovations, and second, between disruptive innovations and policy disruptions. Policy disruptions are the political fallout of disruptive innovations. They are caused by a deficit in regulatory capacity due to rapid increases in the rate of change in a regulated market. Not all disruptive innovations cause policy disruptions. Disruptive innovations that are fast-moving, novel and obscure allow disruptors to move before regulators, catching them off guard. When the innovations are controversial, they build political pressure. Due to technicality, complexity, and transnationality, policy disruptions are sustained and difficult to address. Policy disruptions can be adapted to by making regulation faster or making the market slower, and examples of this are provided. By revisiting the evidence, I argue that there is evidence that e-cigarettes have created a policy disruption in the EU.

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Paper presented at the annual conference of the British International Studies Association - International Political Economy Group, Leeds University. 

The New Normal (TNN) is the idea that the increased levels of uncertainty, unemployment, inequality, poverty and market volatility following the financial crisis of 2008 represent a new standard societal situation that will not recover to pre-crisis levels on its own. This paper puts forward the idea that TNN has brought with it a related political shift in the conditions and expectations of policymaking. The three core features of New Normal politics are: the transnational professionalization of regulation, social acceleration and scientific controversy. I argue that the transnational professionalization of regulation is in part driven by its perceived efficacy in overcoming the pressures of social acceleration and scientific controversies on regulatory work. However, this perception glosses over serious and currently unchallenged implications for democratic process and accountability and leaves many questions as to the nature and tradeoffs of this new regulatory work unanswered. This paper thus advances the debate on the role of professionals in transnational regulation, and opens new, fruitful lines of inquiry.

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• Multilateral environmental agreements (MEAs) are increasingly referred to within trade agreements. The range of MEAs cited in trade agreements is also expanding.
• MEAs within trade agreements are referred to for different reasons, including to provide contextual information for interpretative purposes, to determine hierarchy between agreements, to promote the ratification of MEAs or to demand their implementation
• Using data obtained from the Trade and Environment Database (TREND), this policy brief shows that the practice of referencing MEAs in trade agreements creates significant political and legal opportunities for enhanced MEA effectiveness.

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The European Union is a pioneer in terms of integrating climate issues into trade negotiations. It is the actor that includes the greatest number and range of provisions related climate change in its trade agreements.However, the EU model does not seem to be inspiring other actors in the trade system. Despite the recent proliferation of trade agreements and the exponential increase in provisions relating to the environment in these agreements, few countries are taking inspiration from EU standards.In order to foster an integrated approach to climate change, it would be useful to reproduce on a broader scale the small number of existing climate provisions, and to innovate based on progress made for other environmental issues.

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The US government argues that the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), concluded last October with 11 other Pacific Rim countries, “includes the most robust enforceable environment commitments of any trade agreement in history.” But is this really the case? The TPP undoubtedly goes well beyond multilateral trade rules found in the WTO’s General Agreement on Trade and Tariffs (GATT-1994) that treats environmental protection merely as legitimate grounds for exceptions to trade liberalisation. In the last decade, however, several other bilateral and regional trade agreements have been signed containing stringent and comprehensive environmental commitments. To what extent is the TPP really ground breaking when compared with these?

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To what extent does the imbrication of TTIP in the existing trade and investment complex shape the negotiations? In turn, does TTIP have the potential to shape the rest of the complex moving forward? Our central argument is that TTIP negotiators face both learning constraints and learning opportunities as a result of the trade and investment complex, which will not only influence the current negation process but also the potential outcome of negotiations. The first section of this chapter portrays the ever growing trade and investment complex in which TTIP is being negotiated. The second section analyzes the constraints and opportunities faced by TTIP negotiators. The third section explores some of the negotiators’ strategic calculations as they internalize the impact of the dense regime complex. The conclusion suggests implications of TTIP on the rest of the trade and investment complex.

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Les enjeux reliés à l’exportation de l’eau font depuis longtemps partie du paysage canadien et québécois. En effet, plusieurs grands travaux de détournements de cours d’eau ont été amorcés dans les années trente pour l’approvisionnement en eau potable, l’irrigation et le développement hydro- électrique. Bien que ces projets se soient rapidement infiltrés dans l’imaginaire collectif et qu’ils continuent d’alimenter la controverse de façon périodique, ils n’ont fait l’objet que de peu d’analyses sérieuses. En fait, les projets d’exportation d’eau en vrac soulèvent des enjeux juridiques, économiques et environnementaux majeurs. Nous mettrons en relief l’importance de ces trois éléments dans la présente étude. La première section abordera le cadre juridique de l’exportation de l’eau, la seconde analysera la nature des marchés visés, et la troisième et dernière section soulèvera les principaux enjeux sociaux et environnementaux soulevés par une telle activité.

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Du fait de la difficulté à mettre en place des initiatives ordinaires d’adaptation aux changements climatiques en milieu urbain, nombreux sont les citoyens et organismes qui préfèrent sortir des sentiers battus pour expérimenter de nouvelles façons d’agir directement sur le territoire. Opérations de verdissement, compostage collectif, agriculture urbaine sont quelques déclinaisons de ces expérimentations locales d’adaptation du milieu. Quels sont les effets de telles expérimentations ? Comment les microactions contribuent-elles à l’adaptation aux changements climatiques plus largement ?
 

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The new communication revolution is around the corner: space-based broadband internet will soon be available everywhere on Earth. SpaceX begun testing Starlink satellites this summer and is inviting users from the general public to participate. With four billion people around the world currently without any access to broadband internet, the potential market for these space-based internet services is huge, as is the potential effect of providing internet access in remote places. Yet, while the technical challenges to providing internet services through these satellites are fast being met, the governance and environmental challenges still need to be addressed.

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Les altitudes visées par les opérateurs de satellites sont déjà congestionnées par des débris.

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It is a common practice today to speak about the demise of the liberal world order. Threats to multilateralism, free trade and democratic values seem to arise from everywhere; both through a growing assertiveness of authoritarian regimes, but also from within liberal democracies.This creates particular challenges for international cooperation at a time when the world is increasingly confronted with new or (re-)emerging and transversal issues such as digital privacy and inequality. These issues are insufficiently regulated within our existing system of institutions, necessitating new and renewed forms of multilateral cooperation.

In light of these challenges, on the occasion of the 2018 G7 Summit in Charlevoix, Canada and the accompanying Think 7 Summit (a meeting of researchers from G7 countries extended to include a number of outreach partners), we looked at the particular institutional characteristics of the G7 and how they impact its ability to tackle new and transversal issues in global governance. In an article that was the output of our involvement in the Think 7 Summit, we highlighted two important features of the G7 that make it better suited than other international institutions to address these issues: the informality and like-mindedness of G7 members when it comes to social, economic and political values. We argued the G7’s relatively high level of informality, along with its focus on shared values among members make it well adapted to address new and complex issues that have „no home”. At the same time, its members are frequently expected to share problem definitions that enable them to reach faster solutions. Both at the previous Charlevoix and the upcoming Biarritz Summits, leaders of the G7 have committed to dealing with increasingly complex threats to multilateralism and emerging problems such as growing inequality, green finance, and the taxation of the digital economy.

However, as the G7 Summit in Biarritz approaches, it has become clear that the likemindedness of G7 member states is in flux and what we are presented with is a “G6 plus one.” Given the current global context, reaching solutions on these issues has proven to be difficult in light of, in particular, domestic developments in the United States. Yet, with creative solutions building on the G7’s informality and the flexibility it provides, the current era of the G6 plus one will not necessarily relegate the G7 to a phase of decline and inactivity. Ahead of the upcoming summit, we call on leaders to make the most of the G7 by intensifying their debate on a long-term coherent vision strengthening common values and, where this proves to be impossible, to create mini-lateral solutions and long-term plans for particular problems at hand.

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