The precautionary principle has emerged as one of the most contentious international norms within international environmental law. Yet, despite the vexing conceptual uncertainties confronting the precautionary principle, it is repeatedly invoked by policy makers and incorporated within international and domestic environmental law and agreements. This thesis explores how the international norm of precaution comes to be translated from the international sphere to domestic public policy. The research utilizes the pathways framework, which suggests that there are three additional pathways in additional to the direct implementation of international rules in national law and policy - international norms and discourse, markets and direct access - through which actors, institutions and interests can influence domestic and firm-level policy change. The findings propose an explanation of why Canada came to adopt a particular version of the precautionary principle, also revealing the complex nature of norm transfer, the significance of multiple causal pathways of influence and the interactions arising along these pathways.

The purpose of this paper is to perform an exploratory analysis of the causalinteractions among global change drivers of regime shifts. Causal loops diagrams were usedto collect a set of feedback mechanisms underlying abrupt change dynamics in 11 regimeshifts. In order to prioritize drivers and to map out possible causal pathways we used networkanalysis. Agricultural processes, global warming, biodiversity loss, demographic andeconomic drivers are the main causes of regime shifts. Based on the analysis of 400pathways, we intuitively suggest five types of cascading effects between regime shifts.Regime shifts dramatically affect the provision of ecosystem services and might underminethe achievement of the first Millennium Development Goal: reduction of hunger and poverty.