International Environmental Accords Research Paper

1. Subject Matter And Number Of International Environmental Accords

International environmental problems can be divided into four broad types: management of international common pool resources, management of international common sinks, redress of transboundary harm and regulatory harmonization. Common pool resources—such as oil fields or fish stocks—exist in such close physical inter-relation that they cannot be easily divided into separate portions for each user, with the consequence that overhasty or overintense exploitation by any one user depletes the resource for all users. Common sinks are physical places like the atmosphere, a river, or an open tract of land which large numbers of people can reach for disposing of unwanted substances. Common sinks become environmental problems when human injection of gaseous emissions, liquid effluents or solid by-products of agriculture and industrial production are made at such a rate and/or in such aggregate amounts that the sink’s assimilative capacity is exceeded. International common pool resources and international common sinks can be present either in common areas outside the jurisdiction of individual states (the high seas, the atmosphere above the high seas, outer space, Antarctica) or in areas that straddle the boundaries of two or more states.

Both domestically and internationally, common pool resources and common sinks are the exception; the majority of the world’s resources and spaces can be divided into separate portions permitting each user (whether individual, corporate, or communal) to adopt effective management policies on its own. Yet overexploitation of resources that leads to environmental degradation (such as soil erosion from clear-cutting forests) and excessive emissions from industrial production or concentrated urban populations can produce negative effects for others. When these negative effects cause transboundary harm by extending into the territory of neighboring states, governments face demands that they fulfill the obligation to ensure that activity within their borders does not harm persons or places outside. Regulatory harmonization occurs when governments perceive that differences in national rules are hindering efforts to protect species or habitats, or when governments, firms, or both, believe that variation in national rules cause enough difference in the cost of economic activity to give firms in one state a significant advantage over competitors elsewhere.

Nineteenth-century international treaties addressing what we now define as environmental problems were typically bilateral or regional accords about sharing rivers that form international boundaries or traverse the territories of more than one state, reversing localized overexploitation of fish or marine mammals on the high seas, controlling the spread of disease, or protecting migratory wildlife (Ruster et al. 1983). Thus, most of them addressed common pool resources problems and a minority involved regulatory harmonization. The number of environmental treaties and the range of problems they addressed increased steadily after World War I. Of the 62 regional or global environmental agreements concluded between 1920 and 1972 (UNEP 1990), 15 addressed high-seas fishing, 12 marine pollution, 10 human health hazards, 10 wildlife or plant protection and five shared river resources. Of the 103 concluded between January 1973 and December 1998 (UNEP 1990, http://www.sedac./ciesin.org/entri/texts-home.html, http://www.tufts./edu/fletcher/multilaterals.html), 65 addressed the familiar problems: marine pollution (36), high seas fisheries (11), human health hazards (11), plant protection (3) and shared river resources (4), while the other 38 addressed new issues: general environmental cooperation (17), atmospheric pollution (10), nonhuman diseases (6), waste transport (3), and river pollution (2). The balance among types of problems addressed also shifted. The 1920–72 treaties included 24 addressing international common pool resources (mainly high seas fishing), nine protection of international common sinks (mainly the oceans), 11 transboundary harm and 18 regulatory harmonization. The post-1973 treaties include 20 addressing common pool resources (primarily high seas fishing), 36 common sinks (oceans and the atmosphere), 14 transboundary harm and 33 regulatory harmonization.

This broadening of attention was reinforced, and the character of international environmental accords altered fundamentally, by the reconceptualization of environmental problems promoted through the 1972 United Nations Conference on the Human Environment (Stockholm Conference). Previous international environmental agreements addressed problems as isolated difficulties, usually only after the negative effects of current activity were highly visible. Later accords have been informed by clearer understandings of ecology, visions of ecological sustainability, and awareness of the interrelatedness of problems (Schachter 1991, Caldwell 1996). Some, like the 1971 Ramsar Convention on Wetlands, the 1980 Convention on the Conservation of Antarctic Marine Living Resources and the 1992 Convention on Biodiversity, explicitly adopt ecosystems management approaches; even the larger number focused on a particular problem define that problem in ecological terms and reflect growing consensus that problems should be addressed before negative effects become serious. The diffusion of new scientific knowledge informed by ecological paradigms to policy-makers and publics, and the accession of more people sharing ecologically informed beliefs to influential positions in governments, international organizations, nongovernmental organizations and business firms has helped entrench the new beliefs. Citizens, experts, business executives, and political leaders alike are now aware that natural ecosystems and human–environment interactions involve dynamic processes, and that successful environmental policy coordination requires long-term cooperation, periodic assessment of results and frequent policy revision.

2. Features Of Contemporary International Environmental Accords

Though each global or regional multilateral environmental accord contains unique provisions (see descriptions in e.g., Haas et al. 1993, Cameron et al. 1996, Victor et al. 1998, Grubb et al. 1999, Miles 1999, Wettestad 1999, Earthscan and Fridtjof Nansen Institute 1998 99), the most prominent of them share a number of broad features. Most notably, they establish an organizational structure for ongoing consideration of the problem and potential solutions, which involves a conference of the parties (representatives of all participating governments) assisted by an array of advisory committees and a secretariat. This and other features are institutional responses to the need for frequent revision, the desire to expedite the process of bringing international agreements into effect, the character of the actual addressees of policy measures, and the need to assess whether and to what extent environmental improvement is occurring by direct observation of natural ecosystems.

The general consensus that international environmental accords must be designed for frequent revision derives from two forms of uncertainty. The first is the initial inability to identify the full contours of the environmental problem at hand and the type and extent of action needed to redress it, an inability that often makes governments hesitant to accept binding obligations. Uncertainty about the physical aspects of the problem is usually addressed before or during negotiations by convening scientific panels to secure or assemble relevant data, assess its implications, and present the results in a form that policy-makers will understand—as happened in negotiations regarding transboundary air pollution in Europe, protection of the ozone layer and climate change. Uncertainty about the remedial action needed is addressed by adjusting the type and extent of policy measures. Governments often start by agreeing only to cooperate in elucidating the problem or to adopt ‘soft law’ statements of desirable policy directions. Only when they are confident that they understand the basic contours of various possible solutions do they move towards the ‘hard law’ of specific and binding commitments. The second and more persistent form of uncertainty arises from the dynamic character of nature, human–nature interactions, technological innovation and continual revision of scientific knowledge. More than in other areas of international cooperation, participants realize that even the best current understanding is provisional and likely to be revised in light of additional experience or research.

Consensus on the need to facilitate revision of international environmental accords has encouraged extensive use of a new form of international agreement developed in a number of fields after World War II: the framework treaty plus associated protocols (Kiss 1993). The framework treaty specifies the problem to be addressed, the common objectives, and the collective procedures for organizing cooperation while the protocols (sometimes called annexes or schedules) specify the particular regulatory and programmatic measures participating governments agree to implement. This form was foreshadowed in the river-sharing and fisheries agreements of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries creating intergovernmental commissions whose suggestions of particular policy measures often formed the basis for additional treaties and explicitly adopted in a number of technical fields, such as safety of navigation and use of the radio frequency spectrum. Current framework treaty-protocol arrangements link the initial and later agreements more clearly, and provide an organizational platform supporting current efforts to expedite the process of international rulemaking.

Both of the organizational forms common in contemporary international environmental accords— periodic conferences of the parties and heavy reliance on scientific and technical advice provided by committees of relevant experts—also have long antecedents. The early river and fisheries commissions met periodically and secured scientific advice either from a specially constituted scientific advisory committee or an existing international scientific body. The conferences or meetings of the parties institutionalized in contemporary accords differ from the meetings of the early international commissions mainly by involvement of a larger number of governments, participation by higher level officials, greater elaboration of procedures for securing expert advice and greater attention by a wider array of nonstate actors.

The widespread sense of urgency regarding environmental problems has encouraged extensive use of various procedures for expedited international rule-making. In the nineteenth century, multilateral agreements could be opened for acceptance only by unanimous agreement of the states participating in the conference drawing them up (a rule tempered by the deference of others to the views of the great powers), became binding only on those governments which formally ratified the result and did not come into effect even for ratifying governments until all or most of the governments represented at the negotiating conference had ratified. Even with twentieth-century relaxations of the unanimity rule, the need for ratification often means a five to ten year delay between the end of negotiations and the treaty’s taking effect. Waiving the ratification requirement is one way to expedite rulemaking. A few agreements concluded in the mid-twentieth century, including the 1946 International Convention on the Regulation of Whaling and agreements on aviation safety negotiated under International Civil Aviation Organization auspices, substituted an ‘opt out’ procedure for changing technical policy measures (the sort of detail now placed in protocols). Under this procedure, an agreed change goes into effect for all participating governments that have not filed a written objection by a particular date. What this means for implementation depends on who objects. Any objection introduces greater unevenness into implementation; objection from a government that has jurisdiction or control over the activity causing a large part of the problem effectively halts change. As the experience of international fisheries commissions shows, the prospect of objections from major governments create strong pressures for ‘least common denominator’ agreements. Yet an ‘opt out’ clause also means that objectors cannot prevent supporters from proceeding, freeing the latter from the need to persuade even the most skeptical before they try out some policy measure.

The framework treaty-protocol form facilitates taking advantage of other devices for expedited international rulemaking. Most contain two-tier amendment clauses allowing new or modified protocols to be opened for acceptance by smaller majorities of participating governments than are required for proposing changes to the framework treaty. The process of bringing new protocols or modifications into effect has been speeded up by providing for immediate ‘provisional application’ pending acceptance, stipulating shorter deadlines for filing objections, or even, as with ‘adjustments’ to deadline or emissions reductions in the Montreal Protocol, allowing a consensus or qualified majority vote in the meeting of parties to establish an immediately binding obligation.

Though international environmental accords are addressed to governments, the policy measures they specify are meant to affect the behavior of business firms, social groups, households and individuals. Participating governments therefore promise not only to instruct their own officials and agents to act in particular ways but to use their administrative apparatus to affect the actions of private persons and entities. The fact that private individuals, groups and entities are the ultimate addressees of international environmental accords affects both their initial negotiation and their subsequent implementation.

Democratic norms of domestic governance and governments’ awareness that channeling behavior is much easier when policies elicit voluntary compliance, both press governments toward allowing interest groups, social movements and citizens—many of whom have strong material stakes in or strong views about potential policy measures—a voice in the formulation of regulatory measures. This complicates the negotiation of international environmental accords by linking the intergovernmental discussions to both the domestic politics of individual states (particularly the larger industrial ones) and the transnational politics of the environmental movement.

Implementation of agreements is more complicated because affecting the behavior of citizens and private entities requires greater administrative capabilities than simply instructing and supervising officials. The relevant expertise, resources and administrative skills are distributed very unevenly, with the governments of many developing states hard-pressed to develop and maintain them. Those governments need help building capacity to administer the policies they promise to carry out. Awareness that noncompliance may be the result of inability rather than will has altered perceptions of the compliance problem by fostering the realization that punishments or rewards, which rest on assumptions that the recipient has the capacity to comply and only needs the spur of changed incentives, will not work with those who lack capacity. Striking a balance between capacity-building and incentive-shifting is the subject of an ongoing debate between advocates of a ‘management approach’ focused on removing obstacles to compliance through capacity building (e.g., Chayes and Chayes 1995) and advocates of an ‘enforcement approach’ stressing the continued relevance of rewards and punishments (e.g., Downs et al. 1996).

The general agreement that developing more systematic compliance assessment is important to improving the implementation of international environmental accords has inspired development of more coherent ‘systems of implementation review’ (Victor et al. 1998) drawing on precedents developed in the fields of labor standards, human rights and development aid. They combine periodic government self-reporting of activities, comments on those reports or periodic policy review, and in some cases receipt of information from private entities with the traditional devices of intergovernmental complaint and third party dispute resolution. They are managed through new organizational structures, typically small intergovernmental implementation committees reporting to the conference of the parties. Though the details of these review processes vary from treaty to treaty, implementation committees have favored a low-key, nonconfrontational approach premised on the belief that some slippage is inevitable while governments acquire needed resources and learn to cope with their new regulatory tasks.

Even intentional noncompliance is handled in new ways. Most international environmental accords do not employ one of the primary traditional remedies for noncompliance with treaties: retaliatory violation by another participating government. Counterviolation is effective when obligations are reciprocal and counterviolation exerts direct pressure on the noncomplying government, as is common in international trade. It is a less useful device in environmental affairs because few counterviolations put pressure on a violator, and even when they do they take governments further from their joint goal by producing more environmental harm. In response, governments have emphasized other forms of pressure. Implementation committee meetings and conferences of the parties offer ample opportunities for application of peer pressure and shaming. Some multilateral environmental treaties include provisions for trade sanctions. The project evaluation processes included in aid programs instituted in response to Third World governments’ arguments that the industrial states, as causers of most current environmental harm, have the obligation to bear most of the cost of redressing it, provide opportunities for guiding recipient governments towards particular measures. Public concern about environmental problems and the strong transnational organization of the environmentalist movement create the conditions for supplementing—or even substituting for—inter-government pressures by nonstate actor provision of information that would otherwise go unnoticed, public shaming through media and protest campaigns, or organization of consumer boycotts.

The need to assess the results of cooperation separately from levels of compliance stems from the character of environmental problems. Most international agreements, including those on human rights, trade and arms control, establish human-designed conventions and the desired result flows directly from obeying the terms of the agreement. Environmental agreements, in contrast, deal with physical systems having autonomous dynamics. Even complete compliance with treaty commitments will fail to yield environmental improvement if those commitments are too weak or rest on a faulty analysis of the cause and effect relationships between human conduct and environmental degradation.

Determining the existence and extent of environmental improvement requires ongoing monitoring of those portions of the biosphere addressed by the treaty, and periodic scientific assessment of their current and likely future condition. Under most international environmental accords, the monitoring function is performed cooperatively, with governments or national scientific institutes providing parallel observations of conditions in different places derived from terrestrial, marine and atmospheric observation or satellite remote sensing. The integration of these data and analyses of what they convey about current and future natural conditions is performed by a scientific committee composed of relevant experts drawn from many countries that typically reports six months to a year in advance of the conference of the parties at which the assessment will be considered.

When, as is often the case, the scientific assessment indicates a need to alter policy measures, a separate process of identifying potential solutions and selecting among them comes into play, a discussion that hinges on technological feasibility and economic costs and benefits. Recent international environmental accords make provision for securing expert knowledge in these areas through advisory committees of economic and engineering experts, also drawn from various participating states, whose task is to suggest new or revised policy measures to the conference of the parties. These committees also contribute expertise that the political and diplomatic generalists at the conference usually lack and, if they include members of business firms and environmentalist organizations as well as government-employed experts, provide opportunities for expression of nonstate actors’ views on potential regulatory measures.

Neither the scientific nor the technical assessment processes involves substituting ‘expertise’ for ‘politics,’ because decisions about whether and how to revise the policy measures specified in the treaty depends on governments’ calculations of interest and hard political bargaining. However, the advisory committees do form an essential part of the treaty-based ‘preordained learning process’ (Sand 1996, p. 792) by helping policy-makers update their understanding of the biosphere, human–biosphere interactions and feasible policy measures.

3. Factors Influencing The Success Of International Environmental Accords

Efforts to identify the conditions facilitating or inhibiting the negotiation and implementation of international environmental accords have focused on three broad sets of factors: institutions, actor beliefs and material conditions. There is as yet little consensus on how these factors, singly or in combination, contribute to success or failure. This stems partly from the scarcity, until very recently, of carefully designed comparative case studies, but even more from the use of two very different conceptions about how actors think and choose: a rational choice account, regarding actors as utility maximizers with stable interests focused primarily on material costs and benefits, and a social practices account, regarding actors as developing their understandings of themselves and their interests from membership in a wider society and socialization into its norms, discourses and collective learning processes.

Rational choice approaches treat actor interests and motivations as stable and inquire into how material conditions and institutions affect actor choice. Insights into the impact of material conditions and the possible roles of institutions in facilitating negotiation and implementation of agreements have been developed in two ways, by looking at particular features of activity and by classifying problems into broad types posing distinct cooperative challenges because of the way in which actor calculations of self-interest intersect in interaction. The first stream of work has highlighted such considerations as the greater difficulty of regulating large numbers of actors, each creating a small part of the problem, than a small number, each creating a significant part of it; the different opportunities for particular governments to regulate depending on whether those involved in an activity move from place to place (as in shipping) or remain in one place (as in mining); the impact of linkage or separation between costs and benefits of better environmental practice (for instance, the great difficulty of securing cooperation from upstream or upwind polluters); and the influence of changing cost–benefit ratios of environmentally superior action as new technology is developed or regulations alter the relative cost of continuing old rather than adopting new forms of activity.

The second stream, drawing strongly on economic theories of property rights regimes, provision of collective goods and government regulation of markets (e.g., Sandler 1997, Symes 1998), has identified the distinct regulatory challenges posed by different types of situations. In this view, the management of common pool resources and common sinks poses the toughest challenges to successful cooperation because they involve collaboration situations in which actors remain tempted to maximize short-term gain by violating their commitments. The common image of these problems as resembling a ‘prisoner’s dilemma’ (Hardin 1968) leads analysts to conclude that effective institutions are those that reduce actor temptation through lengthening their time horizons and deterring cheating by monitoring and enforcement, tasks more difficult when dealing with large rather than small communities. Transboundary environmental problems, in this analysis, are international level expression of the familiar problem of negative externalities, complicated by the fact more than one government is involved. The range of policy solutions suggested for single countries, ranging from central government ‘command and control’ measures to ‘market-based measures’ resting on conducive property rights, taxation and regulatory regimes, can work across borders only if governments cooperate quite closely. Yet, as rational choice analysts have noticed, this cooperation is hindered because governments (and other actors) have a strong stake in continuing to use the regulatory scheme with which they are already familiar. Rational choice analysts treat regulatory harmonization as a coordination problem in which firms and governments have different preferences about regulation but little incentive to depart from an agreed regulatory scheme once it is established. Here, institutions can be used to increase the likelihood of cooperative action by augmenting the flow of information about actor preferences and behavior, providing possibilities of reducing discontent about differences in costs or benefits through concessions on related issues, or reducing transaction costs by substituting group discussions for one on one bargaining.

Rational choice analysts anticipate that the substantive provisions of international environmental accords will have a strong focus on enforcement mechanisms when addressing common pool resources or common sinks, and a strong focus on information flows, compensation mechanisms and reducing transactions costs when addressing regulatory harmonization. However, the actual development of international environmental accords has not conformed to these expectations. Through addressing these matters current international environmental accords reflect greater concern for developing common information about the environmental problem and fostering joint deliberation regarding standards for proper conduct. This has provided openings for the social practices theorists who claim that actor choices are guided by logics of appropriateness derived from shared definitions of social roles and proper conduct by role-holders, rather than by utilitarian calculation of material interests. In this view, institutions serve primarily to define legitimate and illegitimate courses of conduct, facilitate socialization of actors into their roles, facilitate actor engagement in learning about particular situations, and promote joint deliberation about the content of the shared social beliefs and norms.

Social practices analysts expect greater cooperation on environmental problems when governments (and other actors) adopt an ecological worldview, accept protection of the biosphere as a distinct policy goal, redefine government responsibility and sound business practice to include fostering ecologically sustainable forms of human activity, and include effects on the biosphere among the criteria for judging the merits of alternate economic and social policy measures. For social practices theorists successful international environmental cooperation is not a matter of altering incentives while leaving interests unchanged, but of altering beliefs so definitions of interest will be changed. In their view, institutions are important primarily as mechanisms for facilitating redefinition of social roles and norms, socialization into and internalization of new norms, and continued actor learning.

This orientation has led social practices theorists to focus on the conditions under which learning occurs and new beliefs become disseminated from small groups of initial advocates to wider segments of society (e.g., Clark et al. 2001). These analyses highlight the importance of visible negative effects in triggering reconsideration, of scientific consensus on the extent and material causes of environmental degradation in facilitating acceptance of new information, and of activity by transnational sets of policy entrepreneurs and social movements in disseminating new worldviews, beliefs and information more widely.

Though rational choice and social practices approaches are often treated as irreconcilable theoretical rivals, they are actually complementary because each illuminates particular aspects of human behavior. Social practices analysis is strongest on the importance of causal and normative beliefs in guiding actor choices, and in beginning to identify the mechanisms of deliberation and learning through which those beliefs are maintained or changed. Rational choice analysis is strongest in indicating how material calculations factor into actor choice within the areas of discretion permitted by all but the most determinate social norms, and how different patterns of individual actor positions affect the likelihood of different compromises and the stability of various coalitions that might arise. The complementarity of the two approaches has been recognized implicitly in the stream of policy analysis inquiring into how each of the mechanisms of persuasion, alteration of information, shift in the availability of opportunities to engage in particular behaviors, reward and punishment can be used to bring about desired behavioral change. It is also acknowledged by the growing attention paid among both rational choice and social practices theorists to the ways in which international institutions are affected by and affect domestic realignments that create new constituencies for environmental policies or alter the balance between existing constituencies. Though many social scientists will continue to prefer one approach over the other, a growing number will explore integrating the two more explicitly in more careful empirical tracings of actual processes of establishing, implementing and revising international environmental accords.

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