The Paris Agreement and the Regulatory Chill - Investigating Climate-Trade Conflicts in SIDS

Despite the general consensus on the urgent need for climate mitigation, the achievements of the climate regime have so far been discouraging. The supportiveness of pre-existing global governance institutions should be achieved to enable truly ambitious climate policy. In this thesis, I investigate the theory of regulatory chill in interactions between the WTO and the UNFCCC by examining climate contributions of SIDS. The regulatory chill is caused by the power imbalance in global governance, the hegemony of “disciplinary neoliberalism” and the lack of “disciplinary environmentalism”. Due to the enforcement mechanisms of the WTO, nation states are unwilling to formulate transformative climate policy where it may collide with the legal framework of the trade regime. This study did not find a significant difference between members and non-members and thereby no direct evidence of the regulatory chill. However, the study shows a willingness to trade-restrictive climate contributions where they are multilateral, rather than unilateral. This finding implies a need for common contributions, rather than nationally determined ones as formulated in the Paris Agreement