Global Environmental Change 12 (2002) 73–77
Institutions for Global Environmental Change
Monitoring the effectiveness of international regimes
is now an academic industry in its own right. Regimes
have come of age. For the main global environmental
change issues such as climate change and biodiversity,
they are the big game in town. In his thoughtful and
comprehensive review of the recent work on regime
effectiveness, Oran Young indicates that it is possible to
monitor how far regimes are changing policy, shifting
behaviour, and inclining nation states towards sustain-
ability. What is particularly interesting is that regimes
appear to hold, even when pummelled by belligerent
national leaders. They are robust because collectively we
appear to care for the well-being of the planet, at least to
some degree. What is less edifying is that all regimes are
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Evaluating the success of international environmental regimes:
where are we now?
Oran R. Young*
Dartmouth College, Institute on International Environment Governance, 6214 Fairchild, Hanover, NH 03755, USA
Writing in these pages in 1996 [Vol. 6 (4), pp. 394–
397], Marc Levy observed that research on the
consequences of international environmental regimes
has become a growth industry among students of
international institutions, and he offered a preliminary
assessment of approaches to the study of regime
effectiveness highlighting compliance, behavioural
change, and policy suitability. What has happened in
this field of study during the intervening years? Interest
has continued to rise, and we have made significant
progress in devising analytic techniques appropriate to
an analysis of the effectiveness of international environ-
mental regimes. Yet major challenges lie ahead in this
important area of study, especially when we seek to
separate the effects of institutions from the impacts of
other driving forces in international society. In the
*Tel.: +1-603-646-1253; fax: +1-603-646-1279.
E-mail address: oran.young@dartmouth.edu (O.R. Young).
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inadequate in creating the conditions needed to achieve
sustainability. Admittedly, none was designed with
sustainability specifically in mind. But an ‘effective’
regime should be capable of being tested on this
measure. A sustainability test would also require
regimes to be examined on issues of justice and equity.
May be the next round of effectiveness analysis will
address these deficiencies.
Tim O’Riordan and Andrew Jordana
a
School of Environmental Sciences
University of East Anglia CSERGE
Norwich NR4 7TJ, UK
E-mail address: a.jordan@uea.ac.uk
following paragraphs, I describe recent developments in
this field and comment on some of the most promising
research initiatives currently underway.
1. Defining and measuring the dependent variable
Most research on the consequences of international
regimes focuses on regime effectiveness as the dependent
variable (Underdal and Young, forthcoming). In es-
sence, the resultant stream of analysis asks how the
actual state of the world differs from what it would have
been in the absence of a specific regime and treats this
difference as a measure of the effectiveness of the
relevant regime. While this procedure has obvious
attractions, it raises two major issues that have come
to occupy much of the attention of researchers in this
field.
74 Institutions / Global Environmental Change 12 (2002) 73–77
The first of these issues is conceptual in nature and
focuses on different ways to think about changes in the
state of the world. Adopting a distinction that origi-
nated among scholars concerned with the effectiveness
of public policies, the mainstream of research on regime
effectiveness rests on a distinction among the outputs,
outcomes, and impacts of institutions (Underdal, forth-
coming). Roughly speaking, outputs encompass those
procedures and arrangements (e.g. ratification of inter-
national agreements, promulgation of appropriate
regulations, creation of relevant organizations) needed
to transform a regime from a paper arrangement into a
going concern. Outcomes are behavioural consequences
arising from the creation and operation of a regime.
They include compliance and conformance on the part
of regime members as well as other behavioural changes
occasioned by the operation of a regime. The idea of
impacts, by contrast, refers to problem solving in the
sense of measurable changes in the status of the problem
a regime is designed to address (e.g. reductions in
emissions of ozone-depleting chemicals, improvements
in the state of fish stocks) that can be attributed to the
operation of the regime. Clearly, these categories of
consequences are not mutually exclusive; effective
regimes typically have consequences that fall into all
three categories. But note that a regime can produce
outputs without generating either outcomes or impacts
and that the production of outputs and outcomes
together still does not ensure success with regard to
problem solving. Even if the Kyoto Protocol were to
enter into force and be fully implemented, for instance,
the problem of climate change would not go away. Since
problem solving constitutes the ultimate measure of
regime effectiveness, it is well to bear in mind that
success in the realm of outputs and outcomes does not
guarantee effectiveness at the level of impacts.
These observations lead to a second problem that is
more analytic in nature. How can we demonstrate the
existence of causal connections between the operation
of a regime and the outputs, outcomes, and impacts
thought to be regime consequences (Young, 1999b;
Miles et al., 2001)? If a regime arises in response to a
problemFsuch as the depletion of stratospheric ozone-
Fand the problem subsequently disappears or subsides,
can we be certain that this achievement is properly
interpreted as a consequence of the regime? As
experienced researchers know, there is always a danger
in such situations that apparent connections will turn
out to be spurious correlations. But note that there is an
important relationship between the character of a
regime’s consequences and the difficulty of making
persuasive claims about their causal significance. If the
negotiation of an international agreement (e.g. the 1987
Montreal Protocol) leads to outputs like treaty ratifica-
tion and the promulgation of implementing regulations
within individual member countries, for example, it is
reasonable to conclude that these occurrences are
consequences of the creation of the regime. The causal
chain in such cases is both direct and short. If a regime
arises to deal with a problem like ozone depletion and
the production of ozone-depleting chemicals declines
during the ensuing years, on the other hand, the claim
that the regime can be credited with success in the realm
of problem solving is a far more difficult one to justify
persuasively. The causal chain under such conditions is
longer, and there is more room for other causal forces
(i.e. independent variables) to come into play. Not
surprisingly, therefore, the development of analytic
techniques designed to reveal causal connections be-
tween institutions and their consequences constitutes a
major focus of interest among students of regime
effectiveness (Young, 2001a).
Some researchers have sought to carry this line of
thinking a step further by aggregating the consequences
of regimes in such a way as to produce an overall index
of regime effectiveness. The most sophisticated effort of
this sort treats effectiveness (E) as the proportion of the
distance between the no-regime counterfactual (NR)
and some measure of the collective optimum (CO)
covered by the actual performance (AP) of the regime
(Sprinz and Helm, 1999). This approach yields the
formula
E ¼ AP-NR=CO-NR: ð1Þ
This formula has the attractive properties that it
produces an overall score for the effectiveness of any
given regime falling into the interval between 0 and 1
and that these scores are comparable across regimes.
But note that the approach does not solve the problems
referred to in the previous paragraphs. There is no
procedure built into this index for combining various
types of outputs, outcomes, and impacts to generate a
composite measure of actual performance or AP. Above
all, this approach does not solve the problem of
demonstrating causal connections (Young, 2001a). In
effect, the issue of causality is embedded in the no-
regime counterfactual which is a measure of what would
have happened in the relevant issue area if the regime
had not come into existence.
These difficulties have led some students of regime
effectiveness to propose an alternative approach to the
subject (Mitchell, forthcoming). This alternative starts
by taking some empirically tractable phenomenon (e.g.
trends in the production and consumption of ozone-
depleting chemicals) as the dependent variable and
proceeds to inquire into the role of a number of
independent variables, including institutions or aspects
of institutions, as determinants of the value of the
dependent variable selected. This way of thinking frees
the measurement of the dependent variable from the
need to establish causal connections and allows the
analyst to focus on the proportion of the variance in
 Institutions / Global Environmental Change 12 (2002) 73–77
some measurable variable(s) attributable to the opera-
tion of a number of independent variables, including but
clearly not limited to institutional factors. For the most
part, those who think in these terms assume, either
explicitly or implicitly, that analysts will make use of
some form of multivariate statistics (e.g. multiple
regression), although there are other techniques of
analysis that may prove relevant in this context (Ragin,
1987). It is unlikely that this way of thinking will
displace analyses that treat regime effectiveness as the
dependent variable. But as a means of supplementing
mainstream efforts to explain variations in the effective-
ness of regimes, this alternative seems promising.
2. Explaining regime effectiveness
Assuming we can find satisfactory methods for
measuring variations in success or effectiveness both
across regimes and through time with respect to
individual regimes, the next challenge is to develop
explanations that can account for these variations.
Mainstream efforts to respond to this challenge divide
into two branches, one examining the relative impor-
tance of factors relating to power, interests, and
knowledge as determinants of regime effective and the
other directing attention to the relative importance of
problem structure, institutional attributes, and socio-
economic settings in this context. In both cases, research
has focused so far on the formulation of generalizations
that spell out the role of specific factors as determinants
of regime effectiveness.
Accounts dealing with the role of power, interests,
and knowledge are typically rooted in the larger
intellectual constructs that students of international
relations employ (Baldwin, 1993; Hasenclever et al.,
1997). The views of those who emphasize the impor-
tance of power reflect the perspectives of neo-realism, a
way of thinking that produces hypotheses of the
following type: the success of specific regimes requires
the active participation of a hegemon or dominant
power; the ability of regimes to solve specific problems
will change as a function of shifts in the underlying
configuration of power among the member states
(Keohane, 1986). Neo-institutionalists, by contrast,
approach the effectiveness of regimes in terms of
utilitarian perspectives that emphasize configurations
of interests among key actors. They articulate hypoth-
eses to the effect that regimes will prove successful to the
extent that they reduce transaction costs associated with
interactions among the relevant actors; transparency
regarding the degree to which actors comply with regime
rules or fulfill institutional commitments is a key
determinant of the success of regimes (Oye, 1986). For
their part, those who focus on the role of knowledge
tend to espouse social constructivist modes of analysis;
75
they formulate hypotheses about the importance of a
common discourse or the presence of an epistemic
community to the success of specific regimes (Litfin,
1994; Haas, 1997). The individual hypotheses flowing
from these divergent perspectives are not necessarily
contradictory or mutually exclusive. But they rest on
different models of social processes, a fact that often
makes it difficult to compare and contrast them in a
meaningful fashion.
The other branch of this stream of analysis directs
attention to factors involving the attributes of regimes
and the conditions under which they operate in contrast
to alternative models of social action (Wettestad, 1999).
One influential strand of this mode of analysis focuses
on problem structure and seeks to rank problems on a
scale ranging from benign to malign (Miles et al., 2001).
The implication is that malign problems are particularly
hard to solve and that we can expect regime effectiveness
to vary inversely with the degree of malignancy of the
problem structure. Yet others take the view that regime
design matters and argue that the effectiveness of
individual regimes will be determined, at least in part,
by their institutional attributes and especially by the fit
between these attributes and the nature of the problem
to be solved (Mitchell, 1994). Even hard problems can
be solved, on this account, if the regimes created to cope
with them are well-suited to the essential features of the
problems they address. Beyond this lies the observation
that the socio-economic settings within which regimes
operate are important determinants of the success of
these arrangements (Young, 1999a). A regime that links
actors that share a tradition of effective cooperation in
other issue areas or that operates in a setting character-
ized by economic prosperity, for instance, is more likely
to succeed than a similar arrangement that must build
bridges among antagonistic actors or function during a
period of economic recession. Again, these arguments
are not mutually exclusive. But they do point to
fundamental differences regarding the extent to which
institutions are independent drivers or arrangements
whose success is determined by external forces.
Taken together, these explanatory hypotheses repre-
sent a significant advance in our understanding of the
sources of regime effectiveness. Nevertheless, they leave
a good deal to be desired as contributions to a theory of
effectiveness. It is easy to find prominent examples that
run counter to virtually every generalization about the
roles of power, interests, and knowledge as determinants
of institutional success. Some regimes succeed in the
absence of a hegemon; transparency is not always
needed to ensure effectiveness; the absence of an
epistemic community need not be fatal to the operation
of specific regimes. Similar comments are in order about
generalizations relating to problem structure, regime
design, and setting. Although some problems are
undoubtedly harder to solve than others, we lack a
76 Institutions / Global Environmental Change 12 (2002) 73–77
convincing procedure for operationalizing the benign/
malign continuum (Young, 1999a). Analyses of the
consequences of regime design almost always focus on
the details of specific arrangements; they do not lend
themselves to the formulation of powerful general-
izations pertaining to matters of design. The idea of
socio-economic setting encompasses a wide range of
factors that are not easy to cast in the form of
meaningful hypotheses.
What is to be done? Certainly, there is much to be said
for continuing the mainstream effort to explore the roles
of power, interests, and knowledge along with the effects
of problem structure, regime design, and socio-economic
setting in this realm. But an alternative approach is now
emerging that takes the view that regimes must fulfill
certain basic functions to succeed as problem-solving
devices but that there are many different ways to handle
these functional requirements in specific cases (Young,
2001b). To illustrate, it seems clear that successful
regimes establish behavioural mechanisms that are able
to channel the behaviour of key actors, give rise to
robust social practices that engage actors and capture
their loyalties, and include steering systems that monitor
progress toward desired ends and adjust regulatory and
other provisions as needed to achieve these ends. An
examination of the various ways in which individual
regimes fulfill these functional requirements is not likely
to lead to simple generalizations of the sort considered
earlier in this section. Yet it is reasonable to expect that
this way of thinking can contribute substantially to the
development of inventories of best practices relating to
the design and operation of environmental regimes
(Honkanen et al., 1999). With regard to steering
systems, to take a concrete example, the repertoire of
best practices might include information pertaining to
systems of implementation review (SIRs), noncompli-
ance procedures, multilateral funding mechanisms, the
design of incentive-based policy instruments, and
procedures for adjusting regulatory rules without
triggering a need for ratification on the part of
individual member states. Of course, it will never do to
think of these inventories as cookbooks containing
simple recipes guaranteed to produce successful results
under a wide range of conditions. Even so, such
compilations of best practices may prove useful to those
responsible for designing and operating regimes to deal
with a variety of specific problems.
3. Next steps
The ranks of environmental problems continue to
grow. Today, we are increasingly concerned with global
problems, such as ozone depletion, climate change, and
the loss of biological diversity, that have risen to
prominence alongside more traditional issues like the
management of marine fisheries, international water-
ways, and transboundary pollution. As the ranks of
problems have grown, so too have the ranks of
international regimes designed to solve or manage these
problems. Some of the resultant regimes are more
successful than others by any standard. As a result, we
face an urgent need to learn more about what factors
determine the relative effectiveness of individual regimes
and whether there are opportunities to increase success
through well-informed efforts to design institutional
arrangements to fit the contours of specific problems.
Recent years have witnessed a sharp rise of interest in
this research challenge, and there is clear evidence that
we are making progress in this field of study. Still, much
remains to be done before we can even begin to talk
about the development of a theory of regime effective-
ness. Among the greatest challenges in this field are the
need to find persuasive methods to demonstrate the
causal links between regimes and their consequences and
the need to move beyond simple hypotheses connecting
regime effectiveness to individual factors relating to
power, interests, and knowledge. These are major
challenges; they cannot be met in the absence of a
concerted effort on the part of the research community.
Yet the good news is that we have not begun to exhaust
the range of analytic techniques that can be brought
to bear on the problem of understanding regime
effectiveness.
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