International Norms and Domestic Structures

The traditional conception of watertight compartmentalization between “domestic” and “international” policy issues is simply no longer realistic. The advent of globalization has fundamentally altered how we perceive of policy-making. as Sidney Tarrow put it, “[i]n today’s world, we can no more draw a sharp line between domestic and international politics than we can understand national politics in the United states apart from its local roots” (Tarrow, 2005: 2). The rise of the international importance of the climate change issue is perhaps the most prominent example of the breakdown of the traditional local versus global policy distinction.