Trading-off the Climate?: The Interplay between the WTO and the Kyoto Protocol
Dr Robyn Eckersley - University of Melbourne

This paper offers a critical constructivist framework for understanding the interplay between international regimes that locates regimes in their broader and more dynamic institutional and discursive contexts. It offers a tripartite classification of regime norms – prescriptive rules, general principles and broad discursive frames – as a means of identifying norms and discourses operating at different levels of generality in regime negotiations and regime interplay. It shows how this tripartite analysis enables a more critical analysis of interplay than that offered by neoliberal institutionalists and international lawyers. Using the interplay between the World Trade Organization (WTO) and the climate regime (i.e., UNFCCC, the Kyoto Protocol and its possible successor) as a case study, it shows how the parties have developed only selective rather than comprehensive synergies at the level of rules and principles. More significantly, the transnational discourse of economy-environment integration that underpins the rules and principles of both regimes ultimately sacrifices the protection of the climate at the altar of trade liberalisation.