Policy Sci (2007) 40:187–190 DOI 10.1007/s11077-007-9036-9 BOOK REVIEW

Helmut Breitmeier, Oran R. Young, and Michael Zu¨rn, Analyzing International Environmental Regimes: From Case Study to Database MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 2006, 321 pp, ISBN-10: 0262524619 Elizabeth R. DeSombre

Published online: 12 July 2007 Ó Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2007

The study of international regimes is now several decades old, and much of its development in the last 15 years has been conducted through exploration of regimes created to address international environmental problems. Individual and collective research projects have evaluated nearly every component of international environmental regimes: negotiation, implementation, enforcement, compliance, and effectiveness, to say nothing of the numerous single-case evaluations of the primary environmental regimes that have formed the basis for countless dissertations and books. But these studies have mostly done so in isolation; despite background discussions of existing research, each project begins its empirical analysis anew with its own case studies, limiting the ability to build a collective understanding of the growing number of environmental regimes. Breitmeier, Young, and Zu¨rn aim to change that practice. Their book is an odd hybrid. In part it is a description of the need for, and the process of creating, a database that allows for careful analysis of a wide variety of characteristics of existing international environmental regimes. (The book also contains the actual database for readers to use). And in part it is an evaluation of the knowledge gained from previous research on the effects and effectiveness of international environmental regimes, with analysis performed using the international regimes database the authors created. The authors discuss at length (in the book’s second chapter) the architecture of the database they developed. This discussion is relevant to understanding the choices made, some of which have implications for using the database or interpreting the analyses in the book, but can be skimmed by readers who are more interested in the volume’s empirical chapters. The database itself, included on a CD with the book, is usable only by those with MS Access software (which rules out almost all Macintosh users). The authors indicate that all the information in the database is on the CD, and that a visit to a website can yield the program that will allow MS Access users to manipulate the database on their own.

E. R. DeSombre (&) Wellesley College, Wellesley, MA, USA e-mail: [email protected]

123

188

Policy Sci (2007) 40:187–190

Even apart from the potential to manipulate the data (and even for those without the technical capability to read the CD), the simple gathering in one place of comparable information about many and varied environmental regimes is helpful. The regime coding has been done by acknowledged experts, with each case coded by one practitioner and one scholar, many of the latter among those who wrote the single-case dissertations or books useful in the development of the field. The mere presentation of this information will be useful to researchers. The heart of the book consists of three empirical chapters in which the authors address some of the major theoretical questions in the study of international environmental regimes and use the information in the international regimes database to address current debates. The analysis in these chapters is invaluable. Each begins with an initial overview of the relevant theory derived from previous regime studies, and then conducts analysis using the database to answer specific questions about regimes. In these chapters the authors consider not only the correlations between whatever independent and dependent variables they analyze, but also make use of a section of the database that queries the coders about the extent to which the regime is causally related to behavioral and environmental effects. The first of these analytical chapters addresses issues of compliance. The authors frame a set of questions in terms of the broader matter of why states comply with international rules. They compare utilitarian (cost/benefit) arguments with the broader idea that states comply out of a general respect for the legitimacy of the rules, and the (related) managerial school of compliance that argues that when actors do not comply, it is because they lack the capacity to do so. The experience of international environmental regimes supports the oft-discussed contention that most states comply with most provisions of international law most of the time, and the analysis here attributes this compliance to aspects of the regime itself. The same is true for overcompliance. When states do more than they are required to by international regulations, it is not simply that they are doing what they would have done anyway; the regime itself is responsible for the context in which they go beyond even what is required. Reassuringly, states whose compliance is important to the issue are more likely to comply than are less important states. There is some support here for the role of incentives: regimes that include horizontal sanctioning and strong verification procedures have the best compliance records. But the authors find support for a perspective that mixes this enforcement approach with measures to increase legitimacy, especially in the context of already-strong compliance mechanisms. And they are somewhat surprised to find that capacity building measures do not have a strong effect on compliance. They sum up the most effective route to compliance as ‘‘horizontal enforcement + strong verification mechanisms + juridification + NGO participation + institutional development’’ (p. 112). The next suite of questions revolves around the effects of the variety of decision rules different regimes employ to make choices about regulation. Here the authors compare consensus and (the slightly more rigorous) unanimity voting on the one hand with forms of majority voting in which states can be outvoted. They find that the majority of regimes make decisions by consensus in practice, even when the rules do not require it. They also find that regimes usually meet their goals, whatever decision rule they use. They are reassured by the observation that regimes do make important differences even when using rules that require unanimous voting, arguing that these successes demonstrate that consideration of states’ sovereignty concerns does not lead to least-common-denominator decision making. In addition, this chapter considers the types of measures that regimes undertake to increase the likelihood for compliance, ranging from simple notifications of rule violations

123

Policy Sci (2007) 40:187–190

189

through penalties (including suspension of membership benefits and economic penalties) to capacity-building. The broader framework in which this analysis is situated is the argument between the collective action approach that suggests that hard enforcement measures are central to gaining behavior change and the social practice model in which appropriate behavior becomes routine. (This issue also relates to the managerial approach that focuses on lack of capacity as a primary reason that states don’t comply with international obligations.) The analysis here comes closer to supporting the social practice school, which includes the managerial approach to compliance addressed in the previous chapter. Structurally, the managerial approach is dominant, found in (depending on how the question is asked) about 90% of the cases examined. Regimes that rely on these types of management approaches usually fulfill their goals, and are seen by the coders as having had a major causal influence in doing so, in a large majority of cases. But certain enforcement mechanisms do play an important role, including notices of violation. The authors also find that the inclusion of a transitional period does not have a positive effect on compliance, but (although they do not make this observation themselves) that may be because such periods are not necessarily intended as compliance mechanisms, but rather reflect demands made by reluctant participants as a condition for joining agreements. The final analytical chapter examines the role of specific types of activities that can be undertaken within a regime to ascertain the effects of the regime on behavioral or environmental outcomes. These include monitoring, review of implementation, and processes for assessing the appropriateness of existing commitments in light of new information. The authors contend that these somewhat different concepts all relate to different types of consensual knowledge. Notable among the findings in this section is that the links between knowledge-creation and effects of regimes are not often clear or direct. Although the generation of knowledge within regimes can contribute to a greater understanding of the problem that regimes address, this new knowledge does not always lead to greater success in solving the problems at hand. Analytically, the main problem with the book is that most of the variables examined are never truly independent, and although it might have been possible to control for certain factors with multivariate analysis, that has, for the most part, not been done here. For example, the authors find that ‘‘soft forms of institutionalized verification are counterproductive’’ (p. 75). There is the least compliance in regimes that have these forms of verification, while what the authors characterize as ‘‘hard’’ forms of verification are correlated with high compliance levels. But it would be easy to imagine that the regimes in which actors do not plan to comply are the ones where those actors, in negotiations, agree only to weak verification. In other words, without controlling for the intentions and political calculation of actors in the negotiations you cannot simply compare the relationship between strength of verification processes and compliance. Similarly, the authors note, in an observation that would seem to undermine the managerial perspective on compliance: there is less compliance in regimes that include capacity-building mechanisms than in those that do not. Although Breitmeier, et al. acknowledge that capacity-building mechanisms are more likely to be included on issues that are harder to address, the broader selection bias that underpins this observation can be found in almost any analytical question addressed in the book. The broader conclusion from these examples and similar phenomena throughout is that the causal arrow of the relationships found should be called into question more frequently than the authors do. The correlations noted are indeed useful, but they may say as much about the negotiation process of agreements and the intention of states as they do about a relationship between a given feature of a regime and its effect on the behavior of actors.

123

190

Policy Sci (2007) 40:187–190

The hybrid nature of the book—part theory and empirical analysis; and part creation, discussion and presentation of the tool used for that analysis—also has some downsides. In particular, in the analytical chapters, it can be difficult to give sufficient focus to the results and the analysis, since the discussion of the creation and use of the tool is always lurking in the background. The decision to include both is understandable—the method of the database creation is indeed relevant to understanding the strengths and weaknesses of the empirical analyses (although this aspect could have been discussed in a briefer initial methods chapter in a non-hybrid version). Moreover, the provision of the database itself will certainly provide value-added for those who have the right kinds of computers and operating systems. But it does seem that a separation of the two functions of the book could have served each better. Those planning to make use of this book should approach it knowing that it is not an easy read. The wording describing results is careful but convoluted, because the ways the authors undertake their queries are dependent on the way the database is constructed. And that yields framings of questions that can be hard to understand when first encountered. Chapter 4, for instance, requires that we separate out ‘‘goal attainment’’ from ‘‘problem solving,’’ look at a given mechanism that may have a different relationship with each goal and problem, and further categorize the regime by whether it has a causal effect on outcomes, which may differ across cases where the problem improved or did not. To take an example: the simple observation is made in passing that ‘‘the coders assigned a large causal role to the regime in inducing compliance on the part of the United States in 75 percent of the cases’’ (p. 70). Does this observation mean that the United States complies with regimes 75% of the time, complies with 75% of regime obligations, or complies with an unspecified percentage of regime provisions but when it does comply three quarters of the time this compliance can be attributed to the causal effect of the regime? In this case probably the latter explanation holds, but that then requires figuring out what it is you still do not know (such as the extent to which the United States complies at all, if the hypothesized interpretation is the correct one). Although the wording is probably intended to ensure the truest allegiance to the way the database categorizes information, sorting through what it all means is not intuitive, and doing so fifty times per chapter can be overwhelming. Those who persist, however, will be rewarded with a thorough and careful overview of the state of knowledge on international environmental regimes, and a useful relationship between theory and empirics. There is simply no other existing source that brings these two factors together in such a painstaking and meticulous way.

123