Regime design and cooperation: Differential treatment of parties in international environmental agreements

Abstract

Many international environmental agreements (IEAs) have adopted differentiated rules for groups of countries, based on the recognition of the different circumstances of parties, such as special needs of certain parties (especially developing countries), or the different contribution of parties to the environmental problem at hand. The resulting differential treatment usually consists of differences in the stringency of obligations, different timing of their application, and/or international financial, capacitybuilding or technological assistance. The existence (and design) of preferential treatment for some groups of parties may be a precondition for their entering the agreement in the first place. But in the long term, some types of preferential treatment may lead to new incentives that make broader (and deeper) cooperation more difficult, as observed for the climate change regime by Castro et al. (2011). In this article, I consider the relationship between the existence of differential treatment of parties to an IEA and the outcomes of the bargaining process that led to the adoption of the IEA as well as its effectiveness in terms of compliance and problem-solving. Following the literature on the rational design of international agreements, I regard country differentiation as akin to other flexibility provisions that are expected to facilitate deeper cooperation among parties. Using data from the International Regimes Database (IRD), I test whether country differentiation facilitates countries’ participation in an agreement, improves compliance of parties with the agreement’s provisions, and ultimately improves problem solving by the agreement.