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This paper examines the multilateral governance of trade along with the prospects for its meaningful reform, in the light of recent, crisis-era discrimination against the many types of cross-border commerce. Prior episodes of protectionism provide a useful benchmark. The findings are not optimistic. The current set of multilateral rules is incomplete, has weak incentives for compliance, and can be readily circumvented. Only a far-reaching revision of these rules could induce more restraint.

The tuna resources of the Western and Central Pacific (WCP) are the world's largest and most valuable fisheries of their type and are of significant economic importance to the Pacific Island countries (PICs), through whose waters of national jurisdiction the tuna migrate. Two major concerns exist with the current governance of the fishery. First, PICs are receiving only a small share of the resource rents from the tuna fisheries. Second, current management structure of the fisheries will not ensure the long-term sustainability of the resources. The paper presents a simple model to argue for increased resource taxation as a means of raising tax revenues and improving sustainability of the resource. Such an outcome is only possible when a single policy-maker has the prerogative to set taxes so that the government acts as a Stakelberg leader in this game. Institutional mechanisms to engender cooperation between PIC governments and with distant water fishing nations (DWFNs) to achieve the espoused outcomes of the model are also presented.

The entry into force, on January 1st, 2012, of the European Union Directive 2008/101/EC extending the European Emission Trading System to domestic and international civil aviation has taken the dispute regarding its legitimacy to unprecedented heights. The choice of the EU legislator to include foreign air carriers and their CO2 emissions that occurred beyond EU airspace infuriated third countries, while the fact that the directive applies the same treatment to all airline operators whatever their nationality met vivid criticism from developing countries, in particular China and India.This paper investigates the reasons why the environmental objective pursued by the EU Aviation ETS does not seem sufficient to render its unilateral adoption acceptable to the international community, despite staging multilateral negotiations and despite the flourishing national transplants of the ETS system in other jurisdictions. Thereby it provides a preliminary assessment of what the current row implies for the global governance of climate change. Devoting particular attention to the positions of the EU and China in this dispute, it argues that the opposition to EU endeavour finds its roots in the normative frictions between the climate change regime and the international aviation regime, while the lack of process legitimacy of EU unilateralism provoked third countries’ claims to the infringement of their national sovereignty. Thus, it concludes that in the current international system, the harmonization of regimes’ normative goals and principles must result from a political choice, the absence of which can effectively frustrate the achievement of multilateral cooperation goals. Moreover, in such context, the unilateral imposition of an alternative path involving the other regime members against their consent, to palliate multilateral norm-making, is likely to meet increasingly strong opposition from an increasing number of powerful countries. ; info:eu-repo/semantics/published

The demand for biofuels has expanded rapidly worldwide due to increased interests in energy security, climate change mitigation, and rural development. The increasing production of and trade in biofuels have had immense consequences worldwide, e.g. massive land-use changes impacting on forests, biodiversity and climate, and important socio-economic impacts such as land evictions, competition with food production, and food insecurity. Even though individually each of these issues has received attention in the literature, biofuel governance discussions remain rare. This article identifies this gap through a broad and systematic literature review, which adds to a more rapid policy review that examines the existing biofuel governance framework at the international level. Our examination reveals that governance is scattered in many bilateral and some supranational frameworks. However, a structured framework is seen as important because: (a) the driving forces for biofuels are largely global; (b) the impacts of biofuel trade are beyond the governance capacity of countries or non-state actors; (c) the issue has a complex North-South dimension, as most impacts take place in developing countries while most demand is in the North; and (d) there are a number of conflicting views on biofuels which need to be resolved democratically.