Classifying Commitment in International Environmental Agreements

• In Event: Global Commitment to Addressing Climate Change

Abstract

Not all international agreements are created equal. Some are largely symbolic requiring little to no commitment from member states, while others impose significant burdens. The wide variation in the content of international agreements leads to differences in how many states agree to participate and, ultimately, their effectiveness. Understanding the relative level of commitment required of states across agreements is critical to understanding the functioning and success of interstate cooperation, especially as it relates to the environment. This paper utilizes a novel method, item response theory, to develop an improved measure of treaty commitment that is able to empirically differentiate between treaties with the greatest level of commitment and those with the least. As a demonstration of validity this measure is then compared to existing approaches.

Quantifying the level commitment of international agreements is a challenge. For example, a broad literature focuses on the specific institutions that promote or impede participation (Koremenos, 2016). Yet the tremendous variation in design and vast quantity of agreements makes systematic analysis difficult. Accordingly, when it comes to the quantitative analysis of agreement participation, simple rates of ratification are often used with the assumption that lower participation rates equate to greater commitment.

This paper introduces a novel approach to understanding interstate cooperation by scoring each international agreement by difficulty of commitment. It assumes a trade-off exists between agreements that maximize participation and thus are less legalized and those that have harder legalization at the expense of extensive participation (Von Stein, 2008.) States weigh the relative costs and benefits of participation when making their ratification decisions and some states will systematically sign on to agreements with greater burden while others will not. The differences in propensities of states then allow us to put a numeric value on which agreements require greater commitment and which are largely symbolic. This is the basis of item response theory (IRT).

Originally developed by psychometricians, IRT explains the relationship between an underlying, but unobservable, trait (in this case the level of commitment of an agreement) and its various dependent outcomes(ratification). Traditionally IRT has been used to identify test questions that only the most knowledgeable students are able to get correct. In the same way it identifies international agreements that only most committed states are willing to ratify. The resulting score can be understood as providing a continuum of how effectively each treaty differentiates between those states that are most committed to the environment and those that are not.

This technique is employed on subset of the 1300 multilateral environmental treaties identified by Mitchell (2019). Environmental agreements have long been at the center of studies of international cooperation, not only due to their critical normative importance, but also the tremendous variation in issues addressed and subsequent institutional structures. The resulting measure allows for the empirical evaluation of which environmental agreements are truly the most demanding on those that participate, and which states are willing to make the biggest commitment to global environmental protection, not just those willing to ratify the most agreements. The paper concludes by comparing the IRT scores to other measures of commitment to the environment and comparing results to in-depth institutional studies.

Works Cited

Koremenos, Barbara. 2016. The Continent of International Law. Cambridge University Press.

Stein, Von, J. 2008. “The International Law and Politics of Climate Change: Ratification of the United Nations Framework Convention and the Kyoto Protocol.” Journal of Conflict Resolution 52 (2): 243–68.

Mitchell, Ronald B. 2002-2019. International Environmental Agreements Database Project(version 2018.1)

Author

• Colin Kuehl, Northern Illinois University