Regime Design Matters Essay Example For Students

Regime Design Matters Essay Too many people assume, generally without having given any serious thought to its character or its history, that international law is and always has been a sham. Others seem to think that it is a force with inherent strength of its own Whether the cynic or sciolist is the less helpful is hard to say, but both of them make the same mistake. They both assume that international law is a subject on which anyone can form his opinions intuitively, without taking the trouble, as one has to do with other subjects, to inquire into the relevant facts. —J. L. Brierly Regime design matters.1 International treaties and regimes have value if and only if they cause people to do things they would not otherwise do. Govern ments spend considerable resources and effort drafting and refining treaty language with the (at least nominal) aim of making treaty compliance and effectiveness more likely. This article demonstrates that whether a treaty elicits compliance or other desired behavioral changes depends upon identifiable characteristics of the regime’s compliance systems.2 As negotiators incorporate certain rules into a regime and exclude others, they are making choices that have crucial implications for whether or not actors will comply. For decades, nations have negotiated treaties with simultaneous hope that those treaties would produce better collective outcomes and skepticism about   the ability to influence the way governments or individuals act. Both lawyers and political scientists have theorized about how international legal regimes ca n influence behavior and why they often do not.3 Interest in issues of compliance and verification has a long history in the field of nuclear arms control.4 More recently, this interest in empirically evaluating how interna tional institutions, regimes, and treaties induce compliance and influence behavior has broadened to include other security areas as well as international trade and finance.5 Concern over the fate of the earth’s environment recently has prompted a further extension into questions of whether and how environ mental treaties can be made more effective at eliciting compliance and achieving their goals.6 Researchers in all these issue-areas face two critical questions. First, given that power and interests play important roles in determining behavior at the international level, is any of the compliance we observe with international treaties the result of the treaty’s influence? Second, if treaties and regimes can alter behavior, what strategies can those who negotiate and design regimes use to elicit the greatest possible compliance? This article addresses both these questions by empirically evaluating the international regime controlling inten tional oil pollution. Numerous efforts to increase the regime’s initially low levels of compliance provide data for comparing the different strategies for eliciting compliance within a common context that holds many important   explanatory variables constant. The goal of the treaties underlying this regime has been to reduce intentional discharges of waste oil by tankers after they deliver their cargoes. Since the late 1970s, these treaties have established two quite different compliance syst ems, or â€Å"subrcgimcs,† to accomplish this goal. One has prohibited tanker operators from discharging oil in excess of specified limits. The other has required tanker owners to install expensive pollution reduction equipment by specified dates. Treaty parties viewed both subregimes as equally legitimate and equally binding.7 The two subregimes regulated similar behavior by the same nations and tankers over the same time period. The absence of differences in power and interests would suggest that compliance levels with the two subrcgimcs would be quite similar.8 According to collective action theory, these cases are among the least likely to provide support for the hypothesis that regime design matters: subregime provisions required the powerful and concentrated oil industry to incur large pollution control costs to provide diffuse benefits to the public at large.9 Indeed, the lower cost of complying with discharge limits would suggest that compliance would be higher with those limits than with equipment requirements. Not surprisingly, violations of the limits on discharges have occurred frequently, attesting to the ongoing incentives to violate the agreement and confirming the characterization of oil pollution as a difficul t collaboration problem.10 A puzzle arises, however, from the fact that contrary to expectation compliance has been all but universal with requirements to install expensive equipment that provided no economic benefits. Consideration while designing EssayA study of â€Å"treaty compliance† would aggregate violation of one provision with compliance with another, losing valuable empirical information.17 Restricting study to the explicit rules in a treaty-based regime allows the analyst to distinguish compliance from noncom pliance in clear and replicable ways. Obviously, a focus on explicit rules ignores other potential mechanisms of regime influence, such as norms, principles, and   processes of knowledge creation.18 However, this restrictive definition has the virtue of bringing the debate to a level at which research on actual treaties and actual compliance can contribute to the intellectual and policy debates. This article evaluates the features of a regime that may determine compli ance by differentiating among three parts of any compliance system: a primary rule system, a compliance information system, and a noncompliance response system. The primary rule system consists of the actors , rules, and processes related to the behavior that is the substantive target of the regime. In the choice of who gets regulated and how, the primary rule system determines the pressures and incentives for compliance and violation. The compliance information system consists of the actors, rules, and processes that collect, analyze, and disseminate information on instances of violations and compli ance. Self-reporting, independent monitoring, data analysis, and publishing comprise the compliance information system that determines the amount, quality, and uses made of data on compliance and enforcement. The noncom pliance response system consists of the actors, rules, and processes governing the formal and informal responses—the inducements and sanctions employed to induce those in noncompliance to comply. The noncompliance response system determines the type, likelihood, magnitude, and appropriate ness of responses to noncompliancc. These categories provide the framework used in the remainder of this article to evaluate the oil pollution regime’s sources of success and failure in its attempt to elicit compliance.