Fortuitous Consequence: The Domestic Politics of the 1991 Canada-United States Agreement on Air Quality |
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| Authors: | Juliann Emmons Allison |
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| Institution: | Juliann Emmons Allison is assistant professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of California, Riverside, where she teaches international political economy, international relations, environmental politics, and U.S. foreign policy. In addition to international environmental cooperation, her research interests include bargaining theory and negotiation analysis, feminism, and the role of domestic politics in international relations. Her most recent publications appear in the American Political Science Review, Flashpoints in Environmental Policymaking: Controversies in Achieving Sustainability, and the Journal of Conflict Resolution. |
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| Abstract: | Following more than a decade of negotiations, the Canada-United States Agreement on Air Quality entered into force on March 13, 1991, with the signatures of then-Canadian Prime Minister Brian Mulroney and US. President George Bush. Why was it so difficult for Canadian and US. negotiators to reach agreement? I argue that Canadian and U.S. domestic politics were the primary impediments to resolving the U.S.-Canada acid rain dispute. This article thus casts the dispute in terms of a pair of domestic environmental policy problems, whose timely and complementary solution, furthermore, required executive initiative as the handmaiden of ecological crisis. Heightened public concern about the threat of acidic air pollution in Canada prompted Mulroney's efforts to reduce acid rain. In the United States, a likewise critical change in the public's perception of air quality as a national emergency created the mass support necessary for Bush's federal acid rain control initiative |
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