The Post-Soviet Decline of Central Asia by Sievers Eric W.;

Author:Sievers, Eric W.;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Taylor & Francis Group

The New Sovereignty and Managed Compliance as Organizational and Social Capital

The kind of analysis suggested above requires viewing the world of environmental treaties and institutions as a world of environmental regimes. Since such a viewpoint is a requirement, I must define more narrowly what I mean by regime.

Taken alone, the texts of treaties or the charters of organizations invariably mislead. The treaties themselves are significant of but not wholly dispositive of their eponymous regimes, since not all provisions of conventions are implemented or enforced equally and since a great number of issues and practices develop outside the convention text. Similarly, international institutions do not always faithfully pursue the goals and objectives for which they were (ostensibly) created, nor does their authority or their power remain static.

Accordingly, by “regime” I mean a governance system that is keyed to a specific issue. In turn, governance in this context is the “establishment and operation of a set of rules of conduct that define practices, assign roles, and guide interaction so as to grapple with collective problems.”14 Therefore, an international environmental regime is the sum of the operative rules deployed in the international arena around a specific environmental concern. These rules concern both normative aspects of behavior (the objectives of the regime) and actual rules of how shortfalls in compliance with the normative rules are addressed (enforcement). While some of these rules are explicit, and here the texts of treaties are particularly relevant, others operate as unstated norms or are borrowed from other instruments and institutions, and both change over time. An appreciation of the complex and sometimes contradictory nature of a regime usually requires a more ambitious effort than is possible by concentrating on one treaty or one international organization.

So, the sources of regime rules and changes in regime rules are pluralistic and usually involve some combination of international law, the preferences of hegemonic states, the availability of funding, the activities of subsidiary scientific and compliance bodies, and pressures from non-governmental forces (both businesses and NGOs). For example, a full accounting of the history and present-state of the ozone regime would include, inter alia, the relevant treaties,15 changing rules of international trade in light of the World Trade Organization, the efforts of the GEF to expand its mandate to ozone depleting substances, the reactions of the subsidiary bodies to smuggling and non-compliance, and the pressures brought to bear over the years by Dupont and Greenpeace.

While the normative content of an international environmental regime is founded in a variety of sources, the mechanisms and practices of enforcement are similarly hard to find identified in any one document. It is through this regime lens that the gulf between the ideal of strong rule of law and the bricolage of existing environmental law becomes visible. Whether and which international environmental rules of law are enforced and how depends strongly on an array of economic, political, geopolitical, security, and private interests.

Nevertheless, in some contrast to how enforcement does or does not operate in other international regimes such

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.