Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
regime to signii cantly inl uence behaviour. An extension of this model
could be used to evaluate how much a regime's ef ectiveness depends on
contextual factors. For example, international conferences and reports
might raise the importance of an environmental issue for a few years,
and therefore lead to increased levels of implementation and compliance
(Brown Weiss and Jacobson, 1998).
An advantage of this technique, and also of other quantitative methods,
is that its conclusions can hold reasonably well across many cases even
though they cannot completely explain any specii c regime (Mitchell,
2004, p. 122). However, it is important to avoid confusion between the
notions of statistical signii cance and policy signii cance of the independ-
ent variables (Mitchell, 2004, p. 128). For instance, a study might show
that an independent variable is statistically signii cant, which means that it
can dei nitely explain the variation in the dependent variable. Despite that,
the change in the variation might be so small as to be environmentally
meaningless.
Mitchell's approach is a promising new angle to assess ef ectiveness
with the use of econometrics and by using actual scientii c measurement of
the environmental problem (for example, emissions). However, it largely
depends on availability of similar data for other regimes. For instance,
when measuring marine pollution, it is almost impossible to keep a long
time-series record of pollutants released into the sea, which is necessary
for this type of analysis. Methodological problems would include which
pollutants to measure, at what locations (since pollution may be a local-
ized phenomenon), and how to connect these releases directly to the
regime's regulations. Moreover, the high costs of marine monitoring deter
countries from keeping regular data. So this approach may prove innova-
tive and useful in certain cases, but its applicability in others remains in
question.
All the above quantitative techniques have many advantages, as they can
be based on actual measurements and their conclusions can be valid for
many cases. They counterbalance the problem of generalization of results
that qualitative techniques face. However, they might ignore aspects that
are dii cult to measure numerically (for example, political benei ts) and
might not completely explain particular cases. In that respect, quantitative
analysis should not replace qualitative approaches, but instead a combina-
tion of the two can enable an integrated study of regime ef ectiveness.
Other issues related to the study of regime ef ectiveness
In addition
to the dei nition and measurement of regime ef ectiveness some other
issues related to the study of environmental regimes are worth men-
tioning, notably institutional economics, compliance and verii cation,
