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This paper examines how economic and sociological globalization influence the cross-country diffusion of the most widely adopted non-governmental environmental regime, ISO 14001. This regime encourages firms to adopt progressive environmental programs which are beyond the legal requirement. We present a panel analysis of ISO 14001 adoption across 106 countries over seven years. For economic globalization, we find that trade flows supports diffusion. Sociological globalization supports ISO 14001 though transnational governmental and non-governmental networks and several cultural networks. Spread of ISO 14001 is also facilitated with higher embeddedness in the Internet network. In sum, globalization seems to be positive influence on the cross-country diffusion of a beyond compliance environmental regimes. In sum to better understand the virtues and limitation of globalization, scholars should focus on specific sub-components of economic and sociological globalization and how they influence any policy relevant phenomena. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent discussions on globalization have revived debates about whether countries’ regulatory policies converge to a global standard. Convergence advocates point to the structural pressures of the global economy, the spread of common norms, and the increasing role of international institutions, while the divergence school points to the embeddedness of domestic regulatory institutions and varying domestic political economies. Do various types of globalization lead to convergence in national level responses to non-governmental regimes? This paper will examine cross-national adoption patterns of ISO 14001, perhaps the most important contemporary international non-governmental environmental regime. ISO 14001 offers a process-based system of voluntary regulation instead of an outcome-based system of public regulation that many firms find cumbersome. Thus, it is expected that firms across countries would embrace this regime. This has not consistently been the case. Using a simple measure, the standard deviation divided by the mean of country level ISO 14001 certifications, cross-national divergence has increased from 2.57 in 1997 to 2.63 in 1998, 2.71 in 1999, and 2.91 in 2000. ISO 14001 was launched in 1996. We will investigate ISO 14001 adoption rates for over 80 countries from 1997-2002. We will examine whether and how various types of globalization pressures -- economic, sociological and institutional -- influence country-level ISO 14001 adoption rates. We will use a host of controls to capture the influence of domestic political economy variables. Our cross sectional, time series analysis will make important theoretical and empirical contribution to IPE/CPE literatures by carefully operationalizing various types of globalization and testing how they influence the adoption of perhaps the most important non-governmental environmental regime. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]