Introduction
Over the past three decades, it has become increasingly clear that human behavior poses
serious and potentially irreversible threats to the environment. Improved scientific research,
the rise of environmental movements in the industrialized countries, and the realization that
these problems cannot be solved solely at the national level, have led to the creation and
adoption of an increasing number of international environmental agreements (IEAs). Indeed,
as Figure 1 demonstrates, whereas the first three decades after World War II witnessed the
creation of a limited number of these agreements, a different trend has emerged during the
past thirty years. Starting in 1976, states began creating a great deal more IEAs than in
previous years – almost four times as many per year, on average. IEAs now cover a wide
range of issue areas such as ozone depletion, acid rain, climate change, and biodiversity (to
name a few); and often attract near-universal membership. They are increasingly ‘dense’ in
the sense that a given issue area may be governed by several of these agreements, which may
be partially overlapping and non-hierarchical (Raustiala and Victor 2004).
– Figure 1 About Here –
These trends are of interest to scholars of international law/institutions and international
relations. Indeed, a treaty
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or regime’s effectiveness is in large part a function of its design
(Thompson 2005), which itself is likely to be tightly linked to expectations about the costs
of subsequent compliance and the probability of enforcement (Downs, Rocke, and Barsoom
1996; von Stein 2005). Can non-binding international statements of “principles, norms, and
goals” (Porter and Brown 1996, 17) lead states to improve their environmental practices, or
are precise, legally-binding, commitments necessary to compel change? The answer is not
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For simplicity, I use the term ‘treaty’ generically throughout this paper to denote any agreement between
two or more states.
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Convention