Norms, institutions, and social learning: Trade and environmental policy integration in the WTO and the EU

United Nations' conferences on the environment and development have recognized that environmental protection and sustainable development can only be actualized if environmental norms are integrated into all other areas of public policy. However, the extent to which environmental policy integration has been achieved across sectors and levels of governance in response to these conferences have varied. Concentrating on the supranational level, this study compares the GATT-WTO and the EEC-EU to answer the question of why some policy actors' efforts to integrate environmental norms in trade governance frameworks and outcomes have been more successful than others. The empirical findings show that over the last 35 years, EEC-EU actors have achieved moderate degrees of trade and environmental policy integration in outcomes, while comparable attempts by GATT-WTO actors have resulted in weakly integrated policies. The theoretical explanation introduced for the variation in policy integration is a social learning approach. Four degrees of policy integration (no, weak, medium, strong) are conceptualized to result from four different styles of social learning (simple, complex, reciprocal, conflictual), which are hypothesized to be dependent on varying levels of compatibility between principles and norms and institutional capacity for learning. The argument is that stronger forms of policy integration in the EEC-EU resulted from higher levels of perceived compatibility between trade and environment principles/norms and higher levels of institutional capacity for complex/reciprocal styles of learning. In contrast, lower levels of interpreted principle/norm compatibility and lower levels of institutional capacity in the GATT-WTO for learning contributed to weaker forms of policy integration. Current scholarship on the role of norms in shaping policy change has been criticized for its neglect of theory development. The social learning explanation contributes to theory building by providing scholars with a set of testable, competing propositions for when, how and why learning about norms influences policy integration.