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InChapter 4, we examined the factors that influence the negotiation of environmental treaty regimes. In this chapter we turn to the question of regime effectiveness. Do states actually comply with multilateral environ-mental agreements? Do existing MEAs actually help solve the problems they are designed to address? Why are some treaty regimes more effective than others? What sorts of broader impacts do international environmen-tal regimes have?

The field of international environmental politics leads within the dis-cipline of international relations in generating research on the impacts and effectiveness of international cooperation (Zürn 1998; O’Neill et al.

2004). Part of the reason for this is the problem-driven nature of the field. However, it is also the case that with such a large number of envi-ronmental treaties, many of which have been in place for many years, scholars began moving beyond the question of what makes states cooper-ate in the first place to examining the impacts of environmental treaty regimes as they mature. This work has helped drive research in other areas of international relations theory and global governance. In fact, many of these same issues and concerns apply to other mechanisms of global environmental governance, such as the private regimes we examine in Chapter 7.¹

This chapter addresses the following major questions within this sub-field of international environmental politics, questions that apply equally well to other arenas and modes of global governance:



How do we define“regime effectiveness” and classify the impacts of a treaty regime?



How can we overcome the methodological challenges of demonstrating the causal impacts of international regimes?

1 See Downs et al.1996; Simmons1998; Chayes and Chayes1991,1993; Hasenclever et al.

1997; Simmons and Oudraat2001; Simmons and Hopkins2005.

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What factors determine regime effectiveness, or make one regime more effective than another?



How do regimes– or regime actors – assess their performance and learn from experience? How do they, or can they, exploit linkages across regimes or avoid inter-regime conflicts?



What impacts can regimes have on participating actors and their roles and interests?

The questions raised by scholars and practitioners in this field are critical for normative and theoretical reasons, and speak to a number of important debates. From a problem-solving perspective, we want to know how, and to what extent, international environmental diplomacy slows down, halts, or even reverses global environmental degradation.

If treaty regimes appear to be ineffectual, we want to know how to improve their performance. Some variables that have important causal impacts on regime effectiveness – such as the structure of the inter-national system, or domestic political structures– are relatively fixed, and hard to change. Others are far more malleable, and thus can be used to make policy recommendations. One of these is regime design, or the specific institutional characteristics of treaty regimes. Thus, much work in this subfield has concentrated on these factors, with the aim of influencing the development of existing treaty regimes or the design of future ones.

Second, this work speaks to debates in international relations theory over the utility and impacts of international cooperation and resultant institutions. Does international cooperation work? Does it change the behavior of states over the long term? Do international institutions really matter, and if so, how?²

Empirical findings in the literature to date tell a somewhat positive, albeit mixed, story about regime effectiveness: while the uniform consen-sus is that regimes do matter, their performance varies considerably across regimes, across national contexts, and over time (Young1999; Weiss and Jacobson1998; Miles et al.2002). While countries frequently comply with the obligations they take on, this does not necessarily add up to effective problem solving (Victor et al.1998, p. 661). To some, this means a glass that is half-empty, to others, a glass half-full (Simmons and Oudraat2001, p. 719). Which perspective one chooses depends a good deal on one’s expectations– and how one defines the object and fields of study, and the potential alternative actions and outcomes. It is to these questions we turn in the sections that follow.

2 See, for instance, Mearsheimer1994/5; Martin and Simmons1998.

Defining effectiveness: Compliance, problem-solving, and regime effects

“Regime effectiveness” is a complex and multi-faceted concept, encom-passing how well regimes work across different dimensions and the impacts it has on a range of outcomes and variables. Discussions around identifying these different dimensions of effectiveness have been informed by perspectives from international relations and political science, legal theory, environmental studies, and policymakers.

Two leading scholars offer definitions of effectiveness that capture multiple dimensions of this often difficult concept. Thomas Bernauer identifies successful regimes as“those that 1. Change the behavior or states and other actors in the direction intended by the cooperating parties;

2. Solve the environmental problem they are designed to solve, and 3. Do so in an efficient and equitable manner” (Bernauer1995, p. 338).

Oran Young identifies no fewer than six distinct dimensions of regime effectiveness: problem-solving, goal attainment, and behavioral, process, constitutive, and evaluative effectiveness, taking into account how regimes solve problems or reach their goals, change participants’ behavior in mean-ingful ways, and whether their results meet criteria such as equity or efficiency (Young1994, pp. 143–9).

In practice, scholars have tended to focus on two main dimensions of regime effectiveness: compliance and problem-solving.³ Compliance is usually defined as“the extent to which the behavior of a state – party to an international treaty– actually conforms to the conditions set out in this treaty” (Faure and Lefevere2005, p. 164). Do states implement domestic laws and regulations in order to fulfill their obligations, and do these legal changes induce behavioral changes in the actors they target, such as polluting firms? Do states exceed compliance expectations, or do they stick simply to the letter of the agreement. Studies of compliance have dominated the IEP field.⁴ Behavioral and political changes are easier to identify and measure than other sorts of regime impacts. Further, this area of research conforms most closely to central questions in the study of international cooperation in the broader discipline, in particular with

3 For a discussion of relevant terminology, see Faure and Lefevere 2004. While terms such as“implementation,” “compliance,” and “effectiveness” are often used interchangeably, there are important analytical distinctions between them.“Implementation” usually refers to the laws and regulations states enact in accordance with their treaty obligations, and is, therefore, a subset of compliance, the set of behavioral changes triggered by regime obligations. Effectiveness is more of an umbrella concept, encompassing the elements outlined by Young and Bernauer, but often refers primarily to environmental problem-solving.

4 See Spector and Korula1993; Mitchell1994; Weiss and Jacobson1998; Haas et al.1993.

its focus on the behavior of states, the central political unit in the inter-national system.

Table 5.1outlines some of the different dimensions of compliance and related state activities according to the depth of state commitments required, from shallow to deep. Following Weiss and Jacobson (1998), we note three different types of compliance related behavior. First, proce-dural compliance means that state actors fulfill their obligations to the treaty process, for example by preparing national reports. Second, substantive compliance refers to actions taken to fulfill treaty obligations. Finally, com-pliance with the“spirit” of the treaty refers to actions that fulfill the broad normative framework of the treaty, often spelled out in the treaty’s pream-ble, for example a country’s commitment to placing biodiversity protection in the context of broader goals of conservation or sustainable development.

In each case, compliance may occur at any one of several levels. A shallow level of procedural compliance means, for example, assigning responsi-bility to a government agency for compiling a report, while a deep level of substantive compliance implies enforcing laws that succeed in changing the behavior of target actors, such as polluting firms.

For many (and particularly for analysts with a more interdisciplinary focus), studying compliance is not enough. For example, regimes with the highest rates of compliance may simply be the weakest ones, with the fewest binding obligations, or those that most closely mirror the existing Table 5.1 Dimensions of compliance*

Types of

compliance Procedural Substantive Spirit of the Treaty

Related

* Adapted from Weiss and Jacobson 1998, Table 1.1 (p. 5)

status quo. Thus, they urge a focus on problem-solving effectiveness, cover-ing Young’s dimensions of problem-solving and goal-attainment.⁵ Do international environmental regimes actually help slow down, pre-vent, or even reverse processes of global environmental degradation?

Do regime members actually meet the substantive goals of the regime?

What would the state of the environment be like in its absence? Measuring changes in global environmental problems, and showing that at least part of that change is caused by the existence of the regime, are both difficult but important tasks.

Box 5.1outlines different dimensions of problem solving effectiveness:

goal-attainment addresses the extent to which the regime’s goals and targets are reached, while problem-solving recognizes the possibility that the regime’s actual goals may not be the most appropriate for solving the problem. Note that there is some overlap between goal attainment and the dimensions of compliance outlined in Table 5.1(see also Mitchell 2001).Box 5.1outlines the sorts of questions analysts ask when trying to determine a regime’s problem-solving effectiveness. Many raise quite

Box 5.1 Dimensions of problem-solving effectiveness 1. Goal attainment

a. Specific regime targets

 Are they met in a timely fashion?

 To what extent?

 Do they satisfy criteria of equity or cost-effectiveness?

b. Overarching goals

 Do specific treaty obligations meet regime goals laid out in preamble?

2. Problem-solving

a. Absolute change in environmental quality

 Has the problem been eliminated?

 If not, has relevant environmental quality improved to a measurable degree?

 Has the overall pace of environmental degradation slowed?

 To what extent can these changes be ascribed to the regime?

b. Relative change in environmental quality

 Is the problem better than it would have been in the absence of the regime?

 If there is no overall change, can absence of deterioration be ascribed to the regime?

 If environmental quality has deteriorated, would it have deteriorated further in the regime’s absence?

5 See, for example, Bernauer1995; Bryner1997; Young1999; Miles et al.2002.

difficult methodological issues, as discussed in thenext section of this chapter.

Less independent attention has been paid to the final element of both Bernauer and Young’s definitions, namely the extent to which the regime fulfills criteria of efficiency (cost-effectiveness) and equity. These aspects play an important role in both behavioral and problem-solving notions of effectiveness. Rates of compliance, for example, tend to be far lower if the regime is perceived as inequitable, or to impose an unfair share of the costs on particular parties (Weiss and Jacobson1998).

It is also possible to identify separate sets of regime effects, or impacts, which operate independently of but may, ultimately, feed into regime effectiveness. Regimes may generate distributive effects (changing wealth distribution between rich and poor countries), learning effects (new infor-mation and research that changes our view of the global environment), process effects (e.g. resolving existing, but not necessarily directly related, conflicts between parties), or unanticipated side-effects (Young 2001, pp. 113–14).

One example of a malign“side-effect” of an international regime was the illegal trade in CFCs from southern countries to (usually) small enterprises in northern countries, which emerged during the decade southern countries were still allowed to produce CFCs under the provi-sions of the Montreal Protocol (Clapp1997). A regime may also have unexpected consequences on societies as governments enforce treaty obligations. A particularly egregious example of governments using inter-national treaty obligations to pursue other goals were the policies put in place by the Kenyan government in the 1980s to protect wildlife, which involved oppressive measures against local communities, who happened to be members of a minority group opposed to the government at the time (Peluso1993).

Research on regime effectiveness– in terms of both compliance and problem-solving– has tended to focus on individual regimes, either as single or comparative case studies, in essence treating environmental regimes as autonomous units. Studies which focus on the cumulative or systemic impacts of the growing number and density of environmental treaty regimes have been notably scarce in the literature– although this is changing as interest grows in the study of regime linkage (see below).

Individual regimes may overlap with each other, in ways that may enhance or detract from overall effectiveness. Positive linkages enhance the regimes’ joint problem-solving capacity. But linkages may also be negative: measures that encourage the growth of plantation forests as carbon sinks under the climate regime undermine efforts to protect old-growth forests under the biodiversity regime.

Finally, a deeper set of issues concerns how the construction of and participation in environmental regimes might, collectively, be changing, or transforming, wider practices of global governance and actor roles and identities. These sorts of questions are most closely associated with con-structivist research agendas in international relations theory (O’Neill et al.

2004; Wendt1992; Finnemore1996). For example, does participating in international treaty regimes help change the basic interests and preferen-ces of states themselves? These are difficult questions to answer, partic-ularly as relevant empirical data is hard to acquire, and open to multiple interpretations. In other words, this sort of analysis does not lend itself well to positivist methodologies, which focus on uncovering direct cause and effect relationships in world politics.

Methods, measures, and studying effectiveness

This section focuses on the methodological discussions that have emerged in the IEP field around the study of regime effectiveness. Many studies of regime effectiveness adopt a positivist methodological framework (Hochstetler and Laituri 2004; Mitchell and Bernauer 1998). In other words, they seek to demonstrate direct cause and effect relationships between the existence of an environmental treaty or particular treaty characteristics and observed outcomes. Explaining the causal impact of environmental regimes on compliance or problem-solving outcomes is a complex task, given the range of dependent variables (what one is trying to explain), independent variables (competing explanations of observed changes), and intervening factors (Bernauer 1995; Young 2001). However, the IEP field has made considerable progress in devel-oping methodological tools to answer broader questions of regime effects and effectiveness.⁶

Data collection, comparison, and analysis

One of the major problems in studying effectiveness is that it is often hard to collect adequate and reliable data on the state of the global environment (Haas et al. 1993, p. 7). Recent advances in satellite and imaging technology, as well as emissions measurement technology, have vastly increased experts’ ability to measure environmental change, and,

6 For specific discussions of methodological issues in studying regime effectiveness, see Underdal1992; Bernauer1995; Young and Levy1999; Helm and Sprinz2000; Young 2001; Mitchell2002; Hovi et al.2003a,b; Young2003. For general discussions of methods in IEP, see Mitchell and Bernauer1998; Hochstetler and Laituri2004.

particularly through the internet, the public’s access to environmental data and images. Statistical and modeling techniques have also made it easier to predict environmental outcomes under a variety of scenarios (Edwards2001).

However, much of the available data on environmental changes is gathered by regime secretariats and relies on self-reporting by individual states, which may lack the capacity or will to accurately report results.

Such data, too, is often not standardized across countries, making it hard to draw accurate comparisons. Hazardous waste collection statistics are notorious in this respect, as countries define “hazardous wastes” very differently, making it hard to compare generation, import, and export data in the absence of a well-defined set of international standards (O’Neill2000).

Some of the problems associated with gathering accurate and reliable environmental data help explain the focus in much of the relevant liter-ature on compliance and other behavioral changes on the part of regime participants and other actors. In some cases (e.g. Haas et al.1993), this is a deliberate choice as proxy for problem-solving impacts, as political changes in response to a regime are easier to detect and measure than environmental impacts. It is possible, for example, to follow how a state enacts new rules in order to comply with an international agreement, and follows up on reporting requirements, or asks for assistance, etc., and to compare progress across countries and across regimes. The main critique of choosing compliance as the dependent variable is that it fails to control for the possibility that states create regimes they can comply with most easily, and thus may be the most shallow, in terms of changing the behavior of polluting actors or moving towards solving an environmental problem (Downs et al.1996; Bernauer1995).

Exogenous factors and counterfactuals

Even when data has been gathered, establishing the causal impact of a regime means addressing problems of exogenous impacts and counter-factuals, especially given the often lengthy time lag between regime implementation and change in the relevant environmental problem.

First, how do we separate the effects of a treaty regime from those of other factors that affect the state of the environment, such as economic shocks, natural changes in the environment, or technological changes (Young2001, p. 100)? For example, the countries of the former Soviet Union were able to reach targets under the climate change and ozone regimes primarily because of the economic collapse the region experi-enced in the 1990s.

Second, studies of effectiveness often have to consider what might have happened if the regime had never existed. It may be the case that the problem might have become far worse in the absence of the regime;

alternatively, countries may have chosen unilateral or other solutions to the problem. Thus, studying regime effectiveness often entails the use of counterfactuals, or thought-experiments, asking “whether the treaty caused environmental improvements that would not have happened oth-erwise, even if they fall short of completely solving the problem” (Mitchell 2001, p. 222). This is, however, a difficult methodological technique to use in a rigorous way. Analysts have to demonstrate that the counter-factual they choose is the most likely alternative (Fearon1991).

Qualitative vs. quantitative methods

In turn, the above dilemmas feed into analysts’ choice of quantitative or qualitative methods to determine exactly how treaty regimes are effective.

Studies of regime effectiveness to date have relied primarily on in-depth, qualitative case studies to establish causal relationships between regimes and their political or environmental impacts. Authors use methods of

“process-tracing” or “thick description” to tell a detailed story that traces out and analyzes the links between the operation of the regime and the chosen dependent variables.⁷Such studies have yielded rich results, and have greatly enhanced our understanding of how international regimes operate.

This choice of method is also very demanding. It is hard for any single scholar to acquire the necessary in-depth knowledge of more than one or two international regimes to be able to compare them, or to draw general conclusions that apply to a number of regimes. Therefore, comparative studies of regime effectiveness more often than not take the form of edited

This choice of method is also very demanding. It is hard for any single scholar to acquire the necessary in-depth knowledge of more than one or two international regimes to be able to compare them, or to draw general conclusions that apply to a number of regimes. Therefore, comparative studies of regime effectiveness more often than not take the form of edited

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