Environmentalists,NAFTA,and North American Environmental Management

Abstract

This essay reviews the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) for its potential contributions to an emerging environmental regime for Canada, Mexico, and the United States. The NAFTAdocument, it is argued, falls well short of meeting the core demands of the environmental lobby as expressed in various documents published in the spring and summer of 1992. It has nevertheless furthered the emergence of a North American environmental management regime by contributing to the mobilization of environmental organizations in the trade policy arena, subjecting existing environmental management arrangements to close scrutiny, generating innovative policy solutions to extant problems, and incorporating a limited number of environmental provisions within the NAFTA document.