The Basel Convention, US politics, and the emergence of non-state e-waste recycling certification

Stefan Renckens ()

International Environmental Agreements: Politics, Law and Economics, 2015, vol. 15, issue 2, 158 pages

Abstract: While many authors have argued that domestic regulatory gaps as well as a lack of international cooperation can at least partly explain the emergence of non-state regulation, this article will focus on an underexplored pathway of emergence linking international, domestic, and non-state regulation. I will argue that even in the presence of a widely supported international agreement, a non-ratifying country can provide the setting for the emergence of non-state certification programs. This will happen when significant domestic legislation on the topics covered by the agreement is absent, and non-state actors are able to act as institutional entrepreneurs with an interest in implementing key elements of this agreement. By tracing the development of certification programs for the electronic waste (e-waste) recycling industry, I will show why the US, more than other countries, provided an enabling environment for the emergence of non-state e-waste recycling certification. The US’s failure to ratify the Basel Convention on transboundary movements of hazardous wastes and an overall lack of domestic legislation on e-waste exports created regulatory gaps that non-state actors were able to fill. The main global watchdog of the Convention—the US-based Basel Action Network—used certification as a forum-shifting strategy to implement key parts of the Convention in the US. Finally, the article will also show that conflicting interests and divergent perspectives on the legitimacy of the Convention and its rules have led to the development of a competing industry-supported certification program. Copyright Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2015

Keywords: Institutional emergence; Non-state certification; Environmental regulation; Electronic waste; Basel Convention; USA (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2015
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1007/s10784-013-9220-7 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:spr:ieaple:v:15:y:2015:i:2:p:141-158

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer.com/economics/journal/10784

DOI: 10.1007/s10784-013-9220-7

Access Statistics for this article

International Environmental Agreements: Politics, Law and Economics is currently edited by Joyeeta Gupta

More articles in International Environmental Agreements: Politics, Law and Economics from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().