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The United States and Canada have shared interests as they relate to ensuring effective regional and global environmental governance. At the same time, U.S.- Canadian ecopolitics has exhibited instances of policy divergence. The purpose of this paper, therefore, is to examine U.S.-Canadian binational efforts to confront environmental challenges that affect both countries. In short, to what extent have the U.S. and Canada been able to resolve transboundary environmental problems that affect the quality of the North American ecosystem? In an effort to learn more about environmental relations involving two countries that share a lengthy North American border, we examined four major issues - - acid rain, NAFTA and the environmental provisions, stratospheric ozone depletion, global warming- - and assess the actions taken by the U.S. and Canada to resolve these shared environmental concerns. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

International and transboundary governance is increasingly characterized by the disentanglement from traditional political institutions and the emergence of new, horizontal and dialogue-oriented governance modes. Within the Great Lakes-regime between the USA and Canada, deliberative governance across national boundaries has been evolved, which produces democratic legitimacy and effectiveness through the inclusion of civil-societal and economic actors, argumentative procedures and common good oriented problem solving. This raises a challenging research question: Is the deliberative mode of governance within the Great Lakes-regime a model case, which allows drawing conclusion on institutional prerequisites and means how to “democratize” governance in similar issue areas? Guided by this research question the paper develops a three-dimensional model (input, throughput, output) of deliberative democracy, which serves as normative-analytical framework in order to identify and to appraise, generally speaking, the potential of deliberative politics in international governance and, in particular, the deliberative potential within the Great Lakes-regime. Equal access to political influence for non-state actors in the political communication and decision making is conceptualized as input-legitimacy. The throughput-proceduralism relies on the communication and action modes between state and non-state actors aiming at collective preference formation. The output-effectiveness relates to the search and formulation of factual and common good oriented problem solving options, which can be recognized by the public as such ones. My long-term empirical study on the Great Lakes reveals that a deliberative network and multilevel governance system of a bilateral decision making body, expert advisory bodies and public participation has been established. Six different public participation procedures on different political-institutional levels have been identified and analyzed by means of an interpretive analytical approach including policy analysis, discourse analysis and speech act analysis: public hearings, workshops, meetings, round tables, focus groups, and public advisory bodies on the regional and local levels. The results of the expert and public participation within a two-years-working cycle are aggregated in biannual reports, which provide the basis of the Canadian and US environmental policy making on the Great Lakes.Against the background of the theoretical-conceptual research on deliberative democracy and the empirical analysis of the Great Lakes-regime, generalizing conclusions can be drawn on the institutional and procedural design of deliberative governance in transboundary and international spaces in form of a loose coupling of decision making bodies, scientific advisory bodies, public participation, and epistemic community. For this purpose the merits and weaknesses of the Great Lakes-regime were carefully considered and the normative thoughts reflected. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research on agenda setting often requires long time frames to illustrate and explain the rise and fall of issues on agendas and the punctuated nature of policy change. But less common are studies which treat time itself as a variable that helps to explain the particular trajectory of a policy issue or set of issues. To appreciate the importance of timing, we must examine agenda setting and policy change processes around similar issues in two settings, where the timing and sequence of key events and strategies differ. This paper examines differences in agenda-setting and policy change around the issue of lawn care pesticides in the United States and Canada. I argue that the timing and sequencing of events, actor mobilization, and venue shifts significantly shaped the divergent paths of the conflicts. The relative mobilization of competing advocacy groups at the start of the campaigns, and successful venue shifts at key moments in the conflicts led to different policy outcomes in the two cases. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Australia, Canada, and the United States share a number of important attributes. They are all English speaking former British colonies. They are continent sized countries with substantial portions of their economies devoted to natural resource extraction and processing. In relationship to climate change, they are also substantial emitters of greenhouse gas emissions, and all three have faced political struggles related to domestic and international climate policy. The United States and Australia are alone among the developed states in refusing to be bound by the Kyoto Protocol. Canada has ratified the Protocol, but its emissions have continued to rise precipitously, and it will be unable to meet its Kyoto commitments without generous use of the flexibility mechanisms contained in the Kyoto Protocol. Given the similarities in the situations of these three states, how do we explain the variation in domestic and foreign policy responses to climate change? This paper will argue that the interaction between international norms and domestic norms fundamentally shaped the domestic framing of climate change as a political problem. The paper will explore the initial framing of climate change as a political problem in each country and will emphasize the role of international and domestic actors in defining the problem and its political significance. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the proliferation of environmental policy conditions within bilateral and small regional trade agreements and assesses the extent to which those conditions affect regulatory standards and their implementation among trading partners, with emphasis on trade agreements the U.S., Canada, and the EU have struck with developing countries. It explains how and why environmental conditionality has become a standard component of these trade agreements. It also examines how unilateral environmental regulation in the large markets of these rich countries is altering environmental policies within export-dependent developing countries. While Parties to the World Trade Organization have been at a prolonged impasse over whether and how to incorporate environmental considerations into global trade agreements, in many cases by explicit intent of both rich and poorer countries, a recent spike in bilateral and regional trade agreements, both formal and tacit, has de facto supplanted WTO talks in this area. Finally, the paper assesses normative consequences. Some observers note approvingly that bilateral and regional trade has become a significant force to improve the capacity for and transparency of environmental law enforcement in countries where implementation has been historically weak. Another important consequence, however, is that the comparatively stronger bargaining position of rich countries in bilateral as opposed to multilateral trade negotiations has imprinted environmental policies on large areas of the developing world that serve the interests and political agendas of rich countries without necessarily addressing environmental priorities of their poorer counterparts. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the wake of the adoption of the Kyoto Protocol in 1997, the American and Canadian governments have taken different environmental policy pathsâ€"Canada has ratified the agreement while the United States has not. But while officially approving the emissions plan, the Canadian government has not acted on its aims and objectives. Meanwhile, the United States has supported other environmental agreements, such as the APEC Sydney Declaration for Climate Change, also signed by Canada. These redirections and evasions serve to rhetorically undermine and defocus the Kyoto initiatives. In both countries, approaches to climate change have been politically and rhetorically opportunistic. In light of the ambiguous defeat of Kyoto in Canada and the United States a political discourse has emerged that has adopted the term “Kyoto” as a rhetorical tool to describe poor environmental policy. Using the debate transcripts from the American House of Representatives and the Canadian House of Commons this interdisciplinary and international panel will investigate the rhetoric of Kyoto from three unique perspectives: that of a rhetorician, that of a political scientist, and that of a biologist. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent academic attention in the fields of American and Canadian environmental politics have pointed to the emergence of new patterns of public-private partnerships that are designed to overcome the political and structural barriers to public participation. This research will use social movement theories to compare how government structures in Canada and the United States can shape and constrain public participation in the politics of natural resource governance. The jumping off point for this research will be to argue that the apparent progression towards collaborative natural resource governance and place-based institutions can be understood as a distinct brand of social movement that is simultaneously constrained by, and infused with, the government it seeks to influence. Understanding how this movement operates is enabled by envisioning the state as a not a cohesive and homogenous unit, but rather an internally contradictory entity that can act against itself (Migdal 2001). Using social movement theories will hilight the structural limitations on movement actions as well as their ability to act as resource mobilizing agents of change. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]