Shared Understandings and Legitimacy: Ingredients to the Evolution of Border Carbon Adjustment Compliance

How do the evolution of norm legality and legitimacy influence each other? This research builds on literature on norm contestation and legitimacy to understand their influence on norm evolution. We combine this literature with the interactional international law framework which provides that shared understandings between actors are the initial step in the evolution of norms. Shared understandings can emerge from discursive interactions in which norms are contested. Shared understandings reflect actors’ perception of a norm’s legality and legitimacy, which influences norms evolution. We apply a vector autoregression approach to an original dataset covering the debate on border carbon adjustment (BCA) between 2002 and 2021 in the European Union and the legal literature. We find strong support that a positive assessment of their legitimacy leads to a positive assessment of their legality. However, legality rarely leads to legitimacy. We also find that legal scholars are influenced by policymakers for both their perception of legality and legitimacy. These findings are relevant to scholars studying the evolution of international norms and institutions, and the impact of legitimacy on this process. It also adds to the ongoing debate on norm contestation and its effect on norm evolution.

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