When and how do international standards influence domestic policies? The literature identifies a range of ways international standards may relate to domestic regulations—including by exporting, substituting, supplanting, or bolstering national rules—creating theoretical ambiguity. This article focuses, in particular, on whether, when, and how standards can help generate regulatory outcomes that are more rigorous than would otherwise be expected, given a jurisdiction’s political economy. We define policy rigor to include both how substantively significant a policy is for regulated entities and also how stringently it is enforced. Positing a coherent international standards landscape in a given policy area as a key enabling condition, we highlight four mechanisms through which standards can increase policy rigor. Learning occurs when domestic actors, facing uncertainty, rely on international standards to understand how to achieve their goals. Normative benchmarking sees domestic actors using these standards as legitimate guides. Agenda-setting elevates the prominence of certain policy outcomes, aligning domestic coalitions around these standards. Harmonization happens when firms advocate for international standards to minimize multinational compliance costs and ensure a level playing field. To probe the plausibility of these mechanisms, our empirical analysis contrasts rules around climate-related disclosure and rules on carbon credits in five major economies with vastly different political economies around climate policy: Brazil, China, the EU, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Across these jurisdictions, domestic disclosure policies are increasingly rigorous, aided by a converging landscape of standards. Conversely, the fragmented carbon credits standards landscape limits these mechanisms, and greater variance in the rigor of domestic regulations is observed. The findings contribute to theoretical debates on the relationship between transnational governance and national rules, highlighting specific pathways through which international standards may serve as a “conveyor belt,” bringing rigorous rules into domestic policy.
Authors: Thomas Hale, Emma Lecavalier, Claas Mertens, Bhavya Gupta, Thom Wetzer.
