A “Conveyor Belt” From International Standards to Domestic Regulation? Evidence From the International Political Economy of Net Zero Governance

Unofficial AI-generated summary based on the public title and abstract. Not an official translation.

🔬研究者:This paper offers a theoretical framework and empirical evidence on the mechanisms through which international standards influence domestic regulatory rigor, contributing to debates in global governance and climate policy.

🏢実務担当者:Companies can understand how converging international disclosure standards may lead to stricter domestic rules, helping them anticipate regulatory trends and proactively align with best practices.

🏛政策担当者:For regulators, this paper highlights the role of international standards as a 'conveyor belt' for rigorous rules, emphasizing the need for coherent global frameworks and the potential to use standards to raise domestic ambition.

ABSTRACT 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.

• crossref https://doi.org/10.1111/rego.70179first seen 2026-07-01 05:48:06 · last seen 2026-07-01 05:50:29