9 - The Norwegian Chain of Wildlife Treaty Effectiveness

Summary

Introduction

In the past seven decades, more than 2,000 treaties that pertain to wildlife have been ratified (Brandi et al 2019). Treaties are written agreements of two or more states, regulated by international law – the international community entrust them with the task of preserving wildlife. Yet this plethora of international wildlife treaties cannot automatically be equated with increased preservation of wildlife. From 1970 to 2016, ‘between 17,000 and 100,000 species’ have become extinct (van Uhm 2016: 19), and there has been ‘an average 69% decline in the relative abundance of monitored wildlife populations around the world between 1970 and 2018’ (WWF 2022: 5). Beyond being ratified, wildlife treaties need to be implemented to have an effect.

Treaties impact reality through a chain of effectiveness that extends from the international to the national to the local (Liljeblad 2004). The links of the chain are: international proposition, state ratification, domestic implementation through legal action, domestic resource allocation, and local behavioural change (Underdal 1992; Jackson and Bührs 2015). A whole field of research – regime effectiveness studies – exists to analyse each of the links in the chain and evaluate the conditions under which a treaty will be effective (Underdal 1992).

Scholars investigating regime effectiveness face a major challenge: The further away the phenomenon being investigated is from the treaty, the more difficult it is to arrive at decisive conclusions about effectiveness. It is, for instance, risky – to say the least – to claim that the text of a treaty caused the change of behaviour of a society. Too many complex elements are at play to claim causality. This difficulty notwithstanding, scholars can gather data to identify the correlation of treaties with changes in the international, national and local levels. Trends provide insights into how treaties work and the conditions under which they thrive.

We know, for example, that treaties that are broad and with few binding obligations attract more signatory parties than those that are focused and contain compulsory duties (Bodansky et al 2017); preferential trade agreements elicit more domestic legislative action than international environmental agreements (Brandi et al 2019); states with a federal political structure are more likely to allocate resources than unitary states (Mauerhofer et al 2015; see also Stefes, this volume); and, behaviour is more likely to change in states where stakeholders participated in the adoption of the treaty than in those from which stakeholders were excluded (Atisa 2020).