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When do parties introduce novel clauses to a system of contracts or treaties? While important research has investigated how clauses diffuse once introduced, few empirical studies address their initial introduction. Drawing on network theory, this paper argues that novel clauses are introduced when agreements are concluded in certain structures of earlier agreements and the clauses they include. This paper demonstrates this argument using the example of 282 different environmental clauses introduced into the trade regime complex through 630 trade agreements concluded between 1945 and 2016. We find that trade agreements are more likely to introduce novelties when they involve parties with a diversity of experience with prior environmental clauses and introduce more novelties when more parties are less constrained by prior trade agreements between them. Contrary to prevailing wisdom, power asymmetry between the negotiating parties is not statistically significant.

AIM Ileocolic resection (ICR) is the most commonly performed operation in Crohn's disease (CD) patients. The surgical report is a vital tool for accessing information to gauge a patient's long-term prognosis and guide treatment decisions. Dictated narrative reports are the traditional method for surgical documentation but often lack essential information. The objective was to assess the quality of operation note in CD patients undergoing ICR. METHOD This was a multi-institutional retrospective cohort collaborative study involving four tertiary inflammatory bowel disease referral centres in the USA and Canada. The patients were consecutive CD patients undergoing ICR between 2014 and 2020. There were no interventions. The main outcome measures were the variability and frequency of 28 critical items in the operation note. RESULTS An analysis of 400 consecutive operation reports in four institutions (n = 100/institution) revealed significant variability in almost all variables. The initial surgical approach and wound protector use were the most consistently or frequently reported across all inflammatory bowel disease centres. The limitation was that this was a retrospective cohort study with inevitable selection bias. CONCLUSIONS This study highlights the need for synoptic reporting in CD patients undergoing ICR.

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 USA 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.

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.

The United States and the European Union include several environmental clauses in their respective preferential trade agreements (PTAs). Building on an exhaustive and fine-grained dataset of PTAs’ environmental clauses, this article makes two contributions. First, it shows that the United States and the European Union have initially favored different approaches to environmental protection in their PTAs. The United States’ concerns over regulatory sovereignty and level playing field have led to a legalistic and adversarial approach, while the European Union's concerns for policy coherence have led to a more procedural and cooperative approach. Second, this article provides evidence that European and American trade negotiators have gradually converged on a shared set of environmental norms. Although the United States and the European Union initially pursued different objectives, they learned from each other and drew similar lessons. As a result, recent American agreements have become more European-like, and European agreements have become more Americanized. This article concludes that U.S. and E.U. approaches, far from being incompatible, can usefully be combined and reinforce each other.

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 favours 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 polarisation in domestic patent politics. As a result, today’s emerging economies experience a more tortuous transformative proc...

What is a policy and when does a policy become foreign? This introductory chapter defines foreign policy analysis (FPA). At the crossroads between the theories of international relations and public policy analysis, FPA draws on multiple disciplines. Few fields of study have embraced disciplines as varied as sociology, economics, public administration, psychology and history with the same enthusiasm. Although there are now calls for interdisciplinarity in all the social sciences, FPA can, undeniably, claim to be a leader when it comes to integrating different disciplines.

How useful is the individual level of analysis in understanding foreign policy? This is a legitimate question since there is still controversy surrounding the use of this unit of analysis. With the behavioral revolution in the 1960s, internationalists abandoned the study of “great men”. Kenneth Waltz was the first to acknowledge that heads of state do sometimes play a defining role, but considered that they are too complex and idiosyncratic for a systematic analysis (1959). In recent years, however, the individual level of analysis has gradually regained its proper place in the analysis of foreign policy. Several internationalists now recognize that completely ignoring the role of individuals is reductive and counterproductive. As this chapter shows, some researchers are focusing on the cognitive and affective characteristics specific to a given individual, while others are trying to identify major trends in the way decision-makers generally perceive and interpret their environment.

Foreign policy decisions are always made within an institutional framework, which shapes actors’ preferences and behavior. This is one of FPA’s most firmly established observations. Since the emergence of neo-institutionalism in the 1980s, the very notion of political institution has broadened. It is no longer merely limited to the constitutional rules that determine how decision-makers are elected. It also includes all formal and informal rules and practices, representations and standards that govern social and political life, both within and outside the state. An array of theoretical approaches, ranging from rationalism to constructivism, can be used to guide research on the impact of institutions on foreign policy. This chapter presents some of the theoretical approaches by focusing on four forms of institutions: parliamentary and electoral system, state organization, political regime and economic regime.

In modern democracies, the bureaucracy is supposed to remain politically neutral and ensure that government decisions are implemented. In reality, the relationships between bureaucrats and political leaders are not always clear-cut. Moreover, the institutional design of the bureaucracy can greatly affect foreign policy. The bureaucracy’s principal resource is no doubt its expertise. It selects the information presented to the leaders and arranges it intelligibly. By presenting the problems or possible actions in a certain way, it structures the leaders’ decision-making. This chapter discusses the control of government leaders over the bureaucracy as well as the influence of the bureaucracy on the foreign policy decision-making.

This article synthesizes the results of two quantitative analyses, one at a macro and the second at a micro level, to shed light on the process of international socialization. The first analysis examines the seeming adoption of intellectual property norms at the state level while the second looks at the internalization of similar norms at the individual decision maker level. Both pay special attention to foreign education and capacity-building courses as carriers of US norms to developing countries. By triangulating the results of these analyses, we develop a more nuanced view of international socialization processes than analyses centred at only one level. We provide clear evidence that institutionalization of foreign norms often takes place prior to individual persuasion rather than as a result of it. We show that different socialization types (acculturation and persuasion) and the transmission of different idea types (causal and normative beliefs) may simultaneously operate in opposing directio...

The first section of this article arranges the four theoretical approaches and methods presented in the special issues – namely interpretative constructivism, post-structuralism, discursive institutionalism and critical discourse analysis – along two dimensions: (a) the role of discourse in the constitution of the world, depending on whether approaches perceive social structure as being constitutive of or constituted by discourse; and (b) interpretation of the weight of material and ideational elements in discourses. This model helps to make sense of the profound theoretical diversity that characterises analytical approaches to international relations discourse. The second section tackles the question of ‘who does the speaking’. It identifies the different voices that converge in the EU’s international choir and problematises the discursive environment that forges international discourses through the theoretical lenses of selected approaches. In the last section, the contributions to this special issue are presented.

Transparency is a widely used concept in debates on international politics, from transnational anti-corruption campaigns to renewed requests for greater disclosure on health, finance, or even security issues. Calls for transparency date back at least to the League of Nations, when internationalists demanded open diplomacy. Yet, it is in the subfield of GEG, and its developments on nonstate actors as a key research topic (see introduction), where the practice and theory of transparency has made the most profound inroads (Gupta 2010a). GEG has been a particularly fertile ground for the development of informational governance (Mol 2008) and the rise of numerous transparency initiatives which have been analyzed in a rapidly developing literature. Importantly, current GEG research is also highly relevant for other IR subfields. For one, recent GEG research can help IR scholars to further refine the concept of transparency and to increase conceptual clarity and sophistication. Second, research on GEG has improved our understanding of the factors that determine the effectiveness of transparency as a governance tool in international politics.

Abstract This article 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 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.

It is a vast understatement to say that the problem of access to medicines in developing countries is complex. Access is limited by a range of factors including inability to pay, a lack of infrastructure, and corruption in some countries. Surrounding and exacerbating these structural and technological problems is the layer of legal rights created by patents and their licensing that complicate and render more expensive the preparation and delivery of needed medicines, particularly those that need to be adapted to the social, health and cultural environment of developing countries. This article provides a survey of innovative strategies that aim at maximizing the potential of patents to facilitate the development and delivery of medicines against diseases, the burden of which falls principally on developing country populations. To understand the context in which these strategies are being proposed and implemented, the article reviews the battles over access to medicines beginning in the late 1980s. It then surveys some of the principal suggestions put forward to better direct innovation systems in addressing the critical health needs of the world's majority including advance market commitments, patent buy-outs, prize funds, public-private partnerships and patent pools. © 2012 London School of Economics and Political Science and John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

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 truth-seeking 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.

This article 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 article 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 huge impact on international patent law making, made both by proponents and critics of the Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights-Plus, 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 intellectual property law, is a wise investment of US Trade Representative's resources., FLWIN, info:eu-repo/semantics/published

Questions have been raised about the impact of onsite sewage treatment and disposal systems (OSTDS) on adjacent water bodies, particularly in coastal areas. If OSTDS are not properly sited and maintained, they pose a potential risk to public health and may contribute toward degradation of the receiving water body. To quantify the pollutant loading contributions from OSTDS located adjacent to coastal canals, two similar single-family residential neighborhoods were evaluated. One was connected to the sanitary sewer network (Hollywood, FL) and the other was served exclusively by septic tanks (Dania Beach, FL). Water quality sampling, focusing on nutrient and pathogen indicators, was conducted at the paired sites during the seasonal high water table (SHWT) and seasonal low water table (SLWT) events. During the SHWT, measured canal water quality, in terms of nutrient (i.e. nitrate) and microbial pathogen indicators in the adjacent areas appeared to be impacted by OSTDS. However, during the SLWT, no obvious impacts attributable to the septic tanks were detected. This suggests that the OSTDS may operate properly when the water table is low, but that the contributions by OSTDS to coastal pollutant loading may be quantifiable during certain portions of the calendar year when the ground water table elevation is relatively high, although the impact on the downstream marine environment is uncertain as a result of tidal dilution and lack of offshore study.

This article seeks to explain a key characteristic of the investment regime. Indeed, a closer look at the regime’s treaties clearly reveals a “lateralism paradox.” On the one hand, most of the attempts to conclude a comprehensive multilateral agreement on the protection of foreign investment have failed (Schrijver 2001: 21–25; Young and Tavares 2004: 2). Although some multilateral investment instruments exist, none of these provides compulsory rules for the liberalization and protection of investment as does Chapter 11 of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), effective since 1994. This is not because there have been no attempts. The investment chapter of the 1948 Havana Charter, the 1959 AbsShawcross Convention on Investments Abroad, the 1967 Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) Convention on the Protection of Foreign Property, and the 1998 Multilateral Agreement on Investment (MAI) were never adopted. The launch of investment negotiations was initially on the Doha agenda of the World Trade Organization (WTO), but a package deal adopted in July 2004 provided that investment issues were not to be negotiated in the Doha Round of trade negotiations. On the other hand, the very same countries that have resisted any multilateral agreement on investment have signed bilateral investment treaties (BITs). Today, there are more than 2,400 BITs involving more than 175 countries (United Na

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.

Abstract This special issue investigates the new landscape of regional trade and economic negotiations. Contributors to this issue propose innovative theories and models to tackle an increasingly intricate web of trade-related issues that confront modern-day negotiators. In particular, they explore the structure, process and regional-international nexus of international trade and economic negotiations.

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, SCOPUS: ar.j, info:eu-repo/semantics/published

There are more problems in the world than any political actor can handle. A diversity of state and non-state actors competes for attention in the international arena by framing a problem, selecting an organized set of information that makes the problem intelligible and transforming it into an issue than can be debated and contested. This chapter aims to describe spirals of contentions , from the moment an issue emerges, passing by its institutionalization, to the point in time when it fades away and leaves space in the international arena for newcomers. The spiral metaphor is used to illustrate that the arguing process is transformative and that no issue ends up exactly where it began. Originating as the agent’s construction, an issue can eventually become the same agent’s constraint. The constant possibility for contestation results in cooptation, drift, gradual build up, reversal of an issue and even disputes over whether the problem is an issue at all (March and Olsen 1989). This approach facilitates a study of the iterative contestation and negotiation process, as state and non-state actors compete to identify, defi ne and implement a policy (Krook and True 2010).

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. © 2013 Lynne Rienner Publishers, Inc., SCOPUS: ar.j, info:eu-repo/semantics/published

This article looks at regime complexes from a state policymaking perspective. It develops a theoretical model in which regime complexes become denser over time while governmental policymaking becomes more coherent. Under this model, interactions between global regime complexes and national policymaking are twofold. On the one hand, greater policy coherence generates negotiated mandates asking for regime connections and complex density. On the other hand, regime-complex density creates more cohesive audiences, which increase incentives for national policy coherence. This co-adjustments model brings states into the discussion of institutional interactions and critically questions the desirability and feasibility of recent calls for joined-up government and whole-of-government approaches. KEYWORDS: regime complexity, policy coherency, substantive coherence, procedural coherence, political audience, life cycle., SCOPUS: ar.j, info:eu-repo/semantics/published

This paper aims at explaining why some developing countries adopt US-style IP rules that go beyond those required by the TRIPs agreement. It disentangles this puzzling situation in two manners. First, it explores one often neglected reason for the adoption of US-style rules, i.e. the socialization of decision-makers in the adopting country through interaction with experts in US IP law. Second, it relies on a more systematic conceptualization and measurement of variables than has been adopted in many previous studies. Overall, it brings forward strong quantitative evidence that socialization is a significant force in the export and import of IP rules.

RÉSUMÉ La périurbanisation favorise l'amélioration des équipements de la région de Saintes. La pratique sportive se développe et les fêtes attirent de plus en plus de monde avec l'aide d'associations et d'élus plus dynamiques. En revanche, le paysage politique change peu, la région restant favorable à la gauche.

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.

Intellectual property occupies a central position in the biotechnology innovation system, the expected source of new medicines, foods and bio-energy. An international and inter-disciplinary research team has convened for the last seven years in an attempt to better understand the mechanisms of intellectual property in biotechnology innovation, and to suggest improvements to the role of intellectual property in that system. This report represents the research team's core findings and recommendations.

Bilateral trade and investment negotiations, including the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP), are often analyzed with metaphors borrowed from mechanics, like ‘building blocks’, ‘stumbling stones’, ‘parallel tracks’, ‘hub and spoke, ‘gravity models’, ‘ratchet effect’, ‘domino theory’, ‘bicycle theory’, etc. These mechanical metaphors are not just nice figures of speech. As heuristic devices, they powerfully – and perhaps insidiously – structure our thinking. They imply that trade and investment agreements are created independently from one another and that their internal composition remains stable until they fall apart under exogenous pressure. These assumptions are useful if one is aiming at isolating variables, attributing causality, and predicting impacts. But are these mechanical metaphors at all accurate in the first place?