Abstract
Anne van Aaken and Betül Simsek's article represents a significant contribution to the literature on international legal compliance. It pushes forward our understanding of the role that positive incentives play in its promotion, usefully highlights potential tradeoffs between positive and negative incentives, and identifies ways in which rewards and penalties may be employed together. While the authors suggest that a richer understanding of rewarding is useful for questions of institutional design, they purposefully focus on the compliance-side of the coin. This essay builds on their theoretical and conceptual ground-clearing to consider rewarding's implications for treaty negotiations and design. In doing so, it focuses on the role that time implicitly plays in the authors’ analysis and argues that assumptions about time horizons inflect all design calculations. For this reason, understandings of temporal dynamics should be foregrounded in both academic and policy realms.
Highlights
Anne van Aaken and Betül Simsek’s article represents a significant contribution to the literature on international legal compliance.[1]
Theoretical and empirical approaches to institutional design and compliance do vary in the extent to which they account for time or address these dynamics
This essay has suggested that foregrounding issues of contingency and temporal dynamics helps scholars better understand processes central to the politics and practice of international law and the institutional design of rewards
Summary
The claim is that temporal assumptions are rarely articulated as such and we have yet to assess how they inform international legal scholarship as a whole. Every theoretical approach presumes that treaty negotiators operate with certain views on the length of their own and targeted actors’ time horizons.[4] Designers rely on a set of assumptions about the temporal scope of various causal processes set in motion by an international agreement Understanding that this is intrinsic to international politics more generally, a growing literature in international relations (IR) has turned its attention to the role of time and temporal assumptions implicit in the field’s major theoretical paradigms.[5] These include the rationalist approaches from which van Aaken and Simsek draw in developing their argument, with implications for questions of both institutional design and rewarding as a compliance mechanism. How do negotiators making design choices understand time? What assumptions do they hold about the temporal scope of key causal processes and mechanisms, namely those sparked by treaty provisions designed to enhance compliance, such as rewards? Can one make design choices without arbitrating between different actors’ time horizons, varying understandings of the duration of causal processes, or divergent cultural conceptions of time? In terms of rewarding, can negotiators draft treaties that effectively anticipate how temporal processes will change targeted actors’ baseline expectations over the short- and/or long-terms? For example, if states begin to view rewards “after some period of time” as entitlements (reducing their effectiveness as such),[8] what is the temporal scope for this process and can negotiators design rewards to prevent or adapt to such an occurrence? The following section considers, albeit non-exhaustively, these issues in the context of the design of international rewards
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