ABSTRACT
This chapter documents the qualitative assessment of the effectiveness of the environmental policies for a subset of US trade agreements: the regional North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and Central America-Dominican Republic Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA-DR), and bilateral trade agreements with Singapore, Oman, and Peru, which were selected for the assessment because they have been implemented for long periods of time, ranging from eight to 24 years, and they captured some of the inherent variation in their overall content and scope. The chapter discusses the methodology used for the assessment, which consists of a combination of political and legal approaches to assess policy effectiveness and draws upon multiple sources of qualitative data, including documentation, archival records, and interviews with individuals involved in the implementation of these policies, and analyzes the data using multiple techniques, including counterfactuals, process tracing, and content analysis. The results of the assessment are presented in the chapter, with the general findings being that some of the environmental policies have had tangible impacts on improving environmental protection systems in trading partner territories, but the impacts have been limited in scope, and many improvements may be more procedural than substantive.
