Negotiating the trade -environment frontier: Biosafety and intellectual property rights in international policy -making

With the advent of globalization, international agreements have proliferated particularly in the areas of trade and the environment. This trend has been characterized by recent debates between the World Trade Organization (WTO) and multilateral environmental agreements. The present study will examine such trade-environment conflicts within international regimes for the international transfer of genetically modified organisms ("biosafety") and the application of international property rights (IPR) to genetic resources. Using the international relations school of regime theory, the study argues that regime theory's traditional focus on cooperation and collaboration needs to be supplemented by a more explicit focus on how intergovernmental conflicts between states are crucial for monitoring the definition and evolution of international regimes. The two case studies on biosafety and IPR over genetic resources detail how national and transnational problems are translated into the positions taken by states within international negotiations. The biosafety study highlights the negotiations of the Cartagena Protocol on Biosafety under the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD), and the IPR case study discusses deliberations on the WTO's Agreement on Trade-Related Intellectual Property Rights, the International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture, and the CBD. The dissertation analyzes the key trade-environment issues within these negotiations and identifies five main "conflict types," depicting the kinds of disagreements arising within the negotiations. The conflict types address: (1) mandates and jurisdictions; (2) interpretation of legal language; (3) implementation; (4) national vs. international commitments; and (5) technical vs. systemic approaches. Use of these conflict types within the context of regime theory can serve as an analytical tool for examining other conflicts in intergovernmental negotiations.