ABSTRACT
The interest-based explanation of the international politics of environmental management focuses on the domestic factors that shape a country’s position in international environmental negotiations. In other words, the interest-based explanation is a unit-level explanation of international relations. The interest-based perspective on international environmental regulation offers a partial but parsimonious view of how a country’s preferences for international regulations are shaped. While the policies of the foregoing countries seem to support the interest-based explanation of support for international environmental regulation, the categorization of the Federal Republic of Germany as a dragger state and of the United States as an intermediate is more problematic. Despite their domestic characteristics, both states began to support large reductions by the end of the negotiations. The chapter suggests that different degrees of ecological vulnerability and of economic capacity explain much of the cross-national variance found in support for international environmental regulation.
