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AbstractThis paper estimates the effects of emerging mega‐regional agreements on the economy of Australia using a Computable General Equilibrium model. Scenarios considered include the 11‐member Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans‐Pacific Partnership (CPTPP) agreement, its possible enlargement to include five additional members ('TPP16') and the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP) currently under negotiation. The study finds that Australia stands to enjoy real income and trade gains along both the CPTPP and RCEP paths. However, since Australia is already benefiting from its own liberal trade policies and many prior trade agreements, benefits are relatively modest, typically below one per cent of real income.

There is a large number of regional agreements concerning Greenhouse Gas (GHG) emissions, often linked to other regional integration agreements. The most successful one in making effort in reducing carbon emissions is the Emission Trading System by the European Union (EU ETS). Apart from this exceptional agreement there are many others, which either focus directly on reducing GHG emissions or were embedded in another agreement. There is little known about the origin, the design or funding of those agreements. Therefore, we point to the potential contribution of those agreements in order to reduce GHG emissions and give an overview on the nature of those agreements to evaluate their success. We classify 15 agreements by their subject (technology / R&D, trade and finance) and examine their record to date. We find that the impact on mitigating climate change has been negligible to date, but the potential to contribute to mitigation climate change at the regional level is substantial.

This paper focuses on the historic James Bay and Northern Quebec Agreement (1975), and the more recent Inuvialuit Final Agreement (1984), the Yukon Umbrella Final Agreement (1990) and the Nunavut Final Agreement (1993). The negotiation of the agreements has been a very complex and protracted process. The agreements give the indigenous parties: legislatively-defined freehold and usufructuary rights to areas traditionally occupied and used; financial compensation for land given up; and rights to advise government agencies and share in the making of decisions regarding wildlife conservation and resource development.

Global agreements to mitigate climate change, conserve biodiversity or combat desertification typically take center stage in scholarly discussions about international environmental politics. Even though the United Nations Environment Programme reported ten years ago that regional agreements make up two-thirds of all international treaties, regional cooperation has by comparison either received scant attention or been conceptually and empirically lumped together with global treaties. This lack of knowledge about the historical and current scope of regional governance is a serious obstacle to understanding the architecture of global environmental governance and to overcoming current bottlenecks in international environmental cooperation. In response, we report on the outcome of an analysis that complements the most comprehensive database on international environmental agreements (iea.uoregon.edu) with variables for analysis at the regional level. We introduce a multidimensional typology of regional agreements based on contiguous/noncontiguous agreement membership, contiguous/noncontiguous spatial ambit, and whether membership and ambit are adjoining and/or coextensive. We discuss the theoretical and empirical relevance of the different types of agreements and the nature and prevalence of special cases. Given the previous lack of research in this area, our primary purpose is to present a systematic account of regional environmental governance, leaving causal analysis to our own and others' future research. We identify a number of knowledge gaps and analytical directions in the conclusion.