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The politics of international regime formation: managing natural resources and the environment

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 May 2009

Oran R. Young
Oran R. Young
Affiliation:
Adjunct Professor of Government, Senior Fellow of the Dickey Endowment, and Director of the Institute of Arctic Studies at Dartmouth College, Hanover, New Hampshire, and Senior Fellow of the Center for Northern Studies, Wolcott, Vermont.
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Abstract

Why do actors in international society succeed in forming institutional arrangements or regimes to cope with some transboundary problems but fail to do so in connection with other, seemingly similar, problems? This article employs a threefold strategy to make progress toward answering this question. The first section prepares the ground by identifying and critiquing the principal models embedded in the existing literature on regime formation, and the second section articulates an alternative model, called institutional bargaining. The third section employs this alternative model to derive some hypotheses about the determinants of success in institutional bargaining and uses these hypotheses, in a preliminary way, to illuminate the process of regime formation in international society. To lend empirical content to the argument, the article focuses throughout on problems relating to natural resources and the environment.

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Articles
Information
International Organization , Volume 43 , Issue 3 , Summer 1989 , pp. 349 - 375
Copyright
Copyright © The IO Foundation 1989

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References

1. Regimes for natural resources and the environment presumably do not differ from other international regimes in any fundamental way, so their use as evidence entails no loss of generality in the analysis that follows.

2. For descriptive accounts of a number of these institutional arrangements, see, for example, Brown, Seyom et al. , Regimes for the Ocean, Outer Space, and Weather (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution, 1977)Google Scholar; Caldwell, Lynton Keith, International Environmental Policy (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1984)Google Scholar; Lyster, Simon, International Wildlife Law (Cambridge: Grotius Publications, 1985)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Soroos, Marvin S., Beyond Sovereignty: The Challenge of Global Policy (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1986)Google Scholar; and World Commission on Environment and Development, Our Common Future (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987)Google Scholar.

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61. This has resulted, among other things, in the development of the Antarctic and Southern Ocean Coalition, a nongovernmental organization that has been able to exercise considerable influence on negotiations relating to Antarctica.

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88. Note that the effects of exogenous shocks or crises on the maintenance of existing regimes may differ from those on the formation of regimes. It is widely believed, for example, that the refusal of the United States to ratify a 1984 protocol extending the life of the fur seal regime was the result of a sharp decline in the northern fur seal population during the 1980s and the belief of many American advocates of animal rights that the regime was inadequate to cope with this problem.

89. Frohlich, Oppenheimer, and Young, Political Leadership and Collective Goods.

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91. Similar comments are probably in order regarding the role of Hans Blix, the executive director of the International Atomic Energy Agency, in promoting the 1986 conventions relating to nuclear accidents.