In this chapter, I seek to develop a theoretical account of how various elements of the NAFTA regime may affect domestic policy processes and outcomes in Canada, Mexico, and the United States, with a particular focus on the environment as an illustrative issue area. To this end, I draw inspiration from Bernstein and Cashore, who recognize the role of, and intersections between, four main “pathways” of policy influence: international rules, international norms, markets, and direct access to policy-making. While some of these pathways have already been addressed in the existing literature on NAFTA, they have rarely been analyzed from the perspective of their policy influence and have seldom been studied together. I aim in this chapter to examine how the various pathways of influence in the NAFTA regime may affect the development and implementation of environmental policy in complex and intersecting ways that are not reducible to the “race-to-the-bottom” and “race-to-the- top” hypotheses that dominate existing scholarship in this area. I proceed as follows. I successively analyze the policy influence exerted by NAFTA’s international rules (Section 2), its direct access mechanisms (Section 3), its market force (Section 4), and its international norms (Section 5). I begin each section by providing a brief overview of the literature that has developed around these four pathways of influence, with a particular focus on their relevance for study- ing the domestic policy influence of regional trade agreements (RTAs). Drawing on existing findings, I then review how the NAFTA regime’s pathways of policy influence have affected domestic environmental policy-making. It must be stressed that much of my analysis of the NAFTA regime is meant to be illustrative of how these different pathways operate and is far from comprehensive or conclusive. I close the chapter by discussing the tensions and synergies that may exist across these pathways for promoting environmental sustainability within North America and lay out an agenda for further empirical research on NAFTA’s complex relationship with domestic policy-making in the field of sustainable development
