Transnational legal orders addressing trade and regulatory reforms in Brazil: model mongers, missionaries, mercenaries and modernizers

• Ano de defesa: 2024
• Autor(a) principal: Fernandes, Magali Favaretto Prieto
• Orientador(a): Badin, Michelle Ratton Sanchez
• Tipo de documento: Tese
• Tipo de acesso: Acesso aberto
• Idioma: eng
• Palavras-chave em Português: Comércio internacional; Governança regulatória; Boas práticas regulatórias; Brasil; Reformas comerciais e regulatórias
• Palavras-chave em Inglês: International trade; Regulatory governance; Good regulatory practices; Brazil; Trade and regulatory reforms
• Link de acesso: https://hdl.handle.net/10438/35346

Reconciling international trade and domestic regulation has always been challenging. Whether divergent regulations are a source of trade distortion, stem from distinct institutional and legal origins, and how trade agreements impact domestic regulation are key issues within the trade-regulation nexus. Evolving trade agreements have increasingly pressured countries to undergo comprehensive regulatory reforms to facilitate trade and investment. Dominant states have projected their regulatory models, such as regulatory coherence, cooperation and Good Regulatory Practices (GRP) through trade agreements and other trade-related arrangements, as well as embedding them into ‘best practices’ promoted by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). Emerging and developing countries have engaged with these models through bilateral and regional trade negotiations or by voluntarily adhering to OECD's GRP principles and ‘soft’ norms. This dissertation centers on the problem of how the projection of dominant regulatory models has influenced and shaped domestic rulemaking systems in developing countries. It contextualizes the research problem within the framework of Transnational Legal Orders (TLOs), examining the emergence, transformations, and interactions between the international trade legal order (ITLO) and the regulatory governance legal order (Reg TLO) across three distinct historical periods. The central argument posits that the ITLO, currently fragmented into preferential trade agreements addressing regulatory matters, has become intermeshed with an emergent and recently institutionalized Reg TLO, primarily centered on the OECD. This intermeshing seems to be resulting in divergent settlements at national levels. To illustrate these developments, the dissertation examines Brazil’s trade and regulatory reforms as an example of the interplay between the ITLO and the Reg TLO in a specific national context. Drawing upon Braithwaite and Drahos' modeling theory and their categorization of ideal types of actors and mechanisms, the study reveals the interactions among national, international, and foreign actors, alongside transnational public-private networks, driving legal and institutional transformations in the domains of foreign trade and regulatory governance.