Abstract
A number of recent international environmental regimes including the Sustainable Development Goals, the Paris Agreement on climate change and the Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction rely on soft law featuring voluntary action, wide-ranging provisions for participants and non-binding commitments, while skirting the idea of sanctions. Because of the increasing prevalence of soft law regimes, their intuitional design attributes and characteristics give rise to new questions about regime effectiveness. Concepts such as compliance and participation that originate from the assessment of the effectiveness of hard law regimes need to be revisited and adapted to this new subset with its distinct characteristics. The aim of this study, then, is to empirically investigate the prospects of effectiveness in the specific case of the Hyogo Framework for Action 2005–2015 on disaster risk reduction (DRR) as an illustrative case study of soft law regimes. The study, thereby, examines participation and compliance as key factors of regime effectiveness by analysing data and descriptive statistics based on national reports and their indicators on DRR measures. The study not only aims to advance the understanding of concepts central to the assessment of regime effectiveness in the context of soft law regimes. It also investigates DRR for the first time on a global scale from a regime effectiveness perspective documenting variation on the country level and serving as a guide to interesting cases and comparative research for future study.
Highlights
In 2015, several international environmental regimes reached a new phase with agreements sharing specific features of institutional design, which can be classified as soft law arrangements based on non-binding commitments, wide-ranging provisions, voluntary action and a lack of sanctions for non-compliance, while aiming at universal membership (Biermann et al 2017; Kelman 2017; Milkoreit and Haapala 2019)
The aim of this study, is to empirically investigate the Hyogo Framework for Action2 (HFA) on disaster risk reduction (DRR) as a specific case of a soft law regime and its prospects of effectiveness. Since these prospects are dependent on participation and compliance with the rules (Barrett and Stavins 2003; Bernauer et al 2013; Compton and Hart 2019; Downie 2013; Young 2013), this study examines these key factors under the HFA by analysing data and descriptive statistics based on national reports and their indicators on DRR measures and follows a three-step approach
Due to deep concern at the number and scale of natural disasters and their increasing impact within recent years, which have resulted in massive loss of life and long-term social, economic and environmental consequences for vulnerable societies throughout the world, in particular developing countries (UN 2006, p. 1), two regimes were established in connection to the United Nations International Strategy for Disaster Reduction, managed by the UN Office for Disaster Risk Reduction (UNDRR)6 and endorsed by the UN General Assembly
Summary
In 2015, several international environmental regimes reached a new phase with agreements sharing specific features of institutional design, which can be classified as soft law arrangements based on non-binding commitments, wide-ranging provisions, voluntary action and a lack of sanctions for non-compliance, while aiming at universal membership (Biermann et al 2017; Kelman 2017; Milkoreit and Haapala 2019). DRR and its governance have been neglected in comparative studies and on a global scale, as a UN commissioned report concluded (Gall et al 2014) This is despite the fact that the Sendai Framework and its predecessor, the Hyogo Framework for Action, share crucial similarities with the aforementioned prominent regimes and are inherently connected with the issues of sustainable development and climate change
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