A 'Conveyor Belt' From International Standards to Domestic Regulation? Lessons From Net Zero Governance

Why do countries with sharply different climate politics end up with strikingly similar rules on climate disclosure, yet sharply different rules on carbon credits? That puzzle is the starting point of our latest paper, ‘A “Conveyor Belt” From International Standards to Domestic Regulation?’, recently published in Regulation & Governance. In this paper we ask when, and how, voluntary international standards can push domestic regulation to become more demanding than a jurisdiction’s own political economy would predict.

The intuition we test is simple. Left to itself, the rigour of a jurisdiction’s rules should track domestic interests: weak where firms resist and governments are unsympathetic, demanding where green coalitions are strong. International standards complicate that picture. A standard written by and for frontrunners may be carried into national law through what one of us has elsewhere called a ‘conveyor belt’ running from voluntary initiative to orchestrated framework, to transnational standard, and finally to binding rule—turning a groundswell of climate action into ground rules for net zero. The question we turn to here is whether this conveyor belt delivers rigour, and under what conditions it does so.

We define ‘rigour’ along two dimensions that together capture what a rule asks of those it governs: ambition (does it require substantive action, or merely gesture at it?) and stringency (is it mandatory and enforceable, or a polite suggestion?). We then compare two domains—climate-related disclosure and carbon crediting—across five major jurisdictions with vastly different political economies around climate policy: Brazil, China, the European Union, the United Kingdom, and the United States. For both disclosure and crediting we draw on the Oxford Climate Policy Monitor for detailed policy assessments. While this research design does not allow for dispositive causal claims, comparing domestic rules across different policy domains and political economies enables us to probe the plausibility of several mechanisms through which standards may enhance the rigour of regulatory outcomes.

Claim: coherence in the international standards landscape is key

Our central claim is that a single feature of the international landscape does most of the work: coherence. Where one standard dominates, or competing standards say substantially the same thing, the conveyor belt runs smoothly. Where standards proliferate and diverge, it jams.

Given coherence, standards can lift domestic rigour through four channels, which tend to compound over time. The first is learning: facing a technical and fast-moving problem, regulators and firms borrow a ready-made template rather than reinvent it. The second is normative benchmarking: actors reach for an international standard because aligning with it confers legitimacy. The third is agenda-setting: the mere existence of a standard puts an issue on the domestic table and hands would-be reformers a rallying point around which to organise. The fourth is harmonisation: firms that operate across borders would usually rather comply with one rulebook than many, and so press their own governments to adopt the common benchmark—the more so once rivals abroad already face it.

Disclosure: coherence, and convergence

In disclosure, the standards have steadily converged, as the recommendations of the Task Force on Climate-related Financial Disclosures were folded into the International Sustainability Standards Board’s IFRS S1 and S2. The domestic consequences are striking. On an aggregate index of climate-policy performance, our five jurisdictions span the full range, from high (the United Kingdom), through medium (the EU and Brazil), to very low (China and the United States). If domestic politics were the whole story, their disclosure rules should mirror that ranking. They do not. Four of the five—Brazil, China, the EU and the UK—now impose mandatory disclosure aligned to all three of the markers we treat as ambitious, including the contested requirement to report supply-chain (Scope 3) emissions. The lone exception is the United States, whose securities regulator adopted such a rule in 2024 and then declined to defend it in 2025.

Tellingly, even the recent ‘backlash’ in climate policy has left the substance largely intact. When the EU and Canada hit pause, they trimmed timelines and narrowed the set of covered firms but did not rewrite the rules away from the international standard. A coherent standard, it seems, can anchor what a rule says even when the political winds turn; how widely and how firmly that rule applies is a separate question, and one that remains in domestic hands.

Carbon credits: fragmentation, and divergence

Carbon crediting offers the mirror image. More than a dozen crediting schemes compete for buyers, each with its own criteria, and the competition has tended to push quality down rather than up. With no coherent benchmark to convey, the conveyor belt has little work to do and outcomes track domestic political economy closely. Brazil, a natural seller of credits, defers to a wide menu of standards, which conveniently enlarges the supply that can count. In the United States, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission’s guidance on listing carbon-credit derivatives leans heavily on private standard-setters while remaining resolutely voluntary. Across all five jurisdictions, rigour is low and uneven. Worse, where standards are fragmented, the harmonisation mechanism can run in reverse: rules defer to any and all standards, regardless of quality, so as to keep the market as large as possible—a race to the bottom rather than the top.

The conveyor belt is neutral

The lesson is not that international standards are a panacea. It is that they are a transmission mechanism whose output depends on its input. A coherent, rigorous standard can raise the floor of national regulation across very different political settings; a fragmented or weak one can produce weaker or more fragmented regulatory outcomes. That carries a practical corollary, and one we think travels well beyond climate. Because coherent standards can shape national law, the often-technocratic arenas in which standards are written—and the orchestration that nudges a crowded field toward a single credible benchmark—deserve far more attention than they usually receive. The mechanisms we identify are not climate-specific: one would expect them to operate wherever international standards meet domestic rule-making, from health and labour standards to aviation safety and the governance of artificial intelligence.

The full article is available here.

Thomas Hale, Emma Lecavalier, Claas Mertens, and Bhavya Gupta are at the Blavatnik School of Government, University of Oxford.

Thom Wetzer is Associate Professor of Law and Finance at the Faculty of Law and Director of the Oxford Sustainable Law Programme, University of Oxford.