Exploring Regime Interaction

Abstract

The international system is populated by a steadily growing number of international institutions. More than two hundred major regimes exist in the field of international environmental protection alone; with five major agreements being adopted per year since the 1980s (Beisheim et al. 1999; see also Sand 1992). While these institutions usually are separately established to respond to particular problems, they increasingly affect each others’ development and performance. In some cases, “regime interaction” creates conflict.1 Whereas the Word Trade Organization (GATT/WTO) promotes free international trade, several international environmental regimes, such as the Basel Convention on the Transboundary Movement of Hazardous Wastes and their Disposal, the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES) and the Montreal Protocol for the protection of the ozone layer, establish new trade restrictions (see Petersmann 1993; Lang 1993; Moltke 1997). Likewise, the 1997 Kyoto Protocol to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change provides incentives for establishing fast-growing mono-cultural tree plantations in order to maximize carbon sequestration from the atmosphere, whereas the Convention on Biological Diversity of 1992 aims at preserving biological diversity of forest ecosystems (see Gillespie 1998; WBGU 1998; Tarasofsky 1999; Pontecorvo 1999). In other cases, interaction creates synergistic effects. The global regime on the transboundary movement of hazardous wastes has been strengthened, for example, upon the establishment of a number of regional regimes addressing the same environmental problem (Meinke 1997).