Скачать или смотреть Research Seminar – How can we make environmental treaties more effective? (Ronald B. Mitchell)

F&ES Research Seminar Series

How can we make environmental treaties more effective?

Ronald B. Mitchell, Professor, Dept. of Political Science, University of Oregon

How can we make environmental treaties more effective? How should we conduct research to guide policy-makers seeking to improve environmental treaties like the 2015 Paris Climate Agreement? Identifying strategies to make treaties more effective requires research that a) distinguishes “treaty effects” from non-treaty factors that shape behavior, b) accounts for the fact that neither treaty design nor treaty membership is randomly assigned, and c) compares multiple treaties that are largely similar but have key differences alleged to enhance treaty effectiveness. We highlight considerations crucial to showing one treaty to have worked better than another and that its greater effectiveness arose from its design, not other factors. We apply this analytic framework to assess if “differentiated obligations” (like those used in the Paris Climate Agreement) will reduce environmentally-harmful behavior more than the “common” obligations used in most environmental treaties. Analysis of protocols regulating air pollution in Europe finds only limited evidence that differentiated obligations prompt states to greater emission reductions. The analytic framework overcomes various obstacles to identifying more effective treaty designs and allows us to compare the effectiveness of multiple treaties. The analysis suggests, however, that data availability may often limit the ability to detect treaty effects where they exist.