Chaire de recherche du Canada en ÉPI
Team
Mathilde Gauquelin is a PhD candidate in Political Science at Ghent University and Université Laval. She holds a Joseph-Armand-Bombardier Doctoral Scholarship from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. Her project is entitled "Explaining Variation in Enforcement Mechanisms across International Agreements: A Focus on Environmental Protection" and aims to explain why international treaties containing similar environmental commitments are subject to distinct enforcement mechanisms. Her approach suggests that the selection of enforcement mechanisms is not strictly based on states' material interests, but also on common norms that public officials come to share through repeated interactions.
Prior to starting her PhD, Mathilde worked for the Secretariat of the 2005 UNESCO Convention on the Protection and Promotion of the Diversity of Cultural Expressions from June 2016 to December 2017, after completing an MA in International Studies at Université Laval. Throughout her studies, she has worked for Global Affairs Canada's Francophonie and Commonwealth Division (2016), the Ministry of Economy, Innovation and Exports' Green Technology Division (2013-2015), and as a research assistant for the Canada Research Chair in International Political Economy (2015-2018) and the Research Group on Contemporary Asia (2013-2018). During her master's studies, she also participated in the Charles-Rousseau Moot Court in Public International Law where she was named 3rd best competitor out of 130 participants.
Projet de recherche en cours
Projet de doctorat : Explaining Variation in Enforcement Mechanisms Across International Agreements: A Focus on Environmental Protection
Essai de maîtrise (complété) : Les limites du système de règlement des différends de l’Organisation mondiale du commerce
Policy reports
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Morin, JF, V Chaudhuri, and M. Gauquelin, 2018, "Do Trade Deals Encourage Environmental Cooperation?" DIE Briefing Paper 8
This briefing paper discusses how provisions on environmental cooperation in trade agreements can contribute to better environmental outcomes. It is frequently assumed that the more enforceable environmental commitments are, the more likely governments are to take action to protect the environment. This assumption leads several experts to argue in favour of strong sanction-based mechanisms of dispute settlement in order to ensure the implementation of trade agreements’ environmental provisions. Nevertheless, there is evidence to suggest that softer provisions can result in increased environmental cooperation, which can in turn favour domestic environmental protection. To shed light on this debate, this paper examines the design and the implementation of cooperative environmental provisions of trade agreements.
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Morin, J-F and M. Gauquelin, 2016, "Trade Agreements as Vectors for the Nagoya Protocol's Implementation", CIGI Papers no 115.
A growing number of trade agreements include provisions related to access to genetic resources and the sharing of the benefits that arise out of their utilization. This paper maps the distribution and the diversity of these provisions. It identifies a great variety of provisions regarding sovereignty over genetic resources, the protection of traditional knowledge, prior informed consent, the disclosure of origin in patent applications and conditions for bioprospecting activities. It also finds that some recent trade agreements provide specific measures designed to facilitate the implementation of access and benefit-sharing (ABS) provisions, including measures related to technical assistance, transparency and dispute settlements. Thus, it appears that trade negotiations can become vectors for the implementation of ABS obligations stemming from the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) and the Nagoya Protocol on Access to Genetic Resources and the Fair and Equitable Sharing of Benefits Arising from their Utilization. The integration of ABS commitments into trade agreements, however, varies greatly, depending on the countries involved. While Latin American countries have played a pioneering role, Canada and the United States still lag behind. The most exemplary ABS standards are not yet widely used, perhaps because they remain little known. These provisions deserve greater attention and should be integrated more widely into international trade agreements.
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