Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
transparency, openness and participation, and environment and security.
These issues can directly or indirectly af ect the ef ectiveness of regimes,
therefore they should be taken into account when studying a particular
regime.
Institutional economics: within the framework of ef ectiveness of inter-
national environmental regimes, and since they belong to the broader cate-
gory of institutions, an issue that is certainly worth looking at is economic
ei ciency or cost-ef ectiveness. This is the extent to which the production
of the best economic outcome is produced by means of the least-cost
combination of inputs. As North (1990) observes, transaction costs are
the measure of economic ei ciency of institutions. He stresses the message
from Coase's theorem that when it is costly to transact, then institutions
matter (Coase, 1960). North's theory of institutions combines human
behaviour with the costs of transacting. The key to the costs of transacting
is the costliness of information. This is because transaction costs include
the price of what is being exchanged, and the costs of protecting rights and
policing and enforcing agreements. He also argues that it needs resources
not only to protect property rights and to enforce agreements but also to
dei ne these rights and agreement rules beforehand. Environmental regimes
must perform certain functions such as limiting use, coordinating users
and responding to changing environmental conditions, which include the
transaction costs of coordination, information-gathering, monitoring and
enforcement. It is easily possible to create a regime so costly to implement
that it overcomes the benei ts to be gained from its existence. Therefore,
when examining the ef ectiveness of international environmental regimes,
researchers should also take into account economic ei ciency and transac-
tion costs. No matter how ef ective a regime is in the amelioration of the
problem it was designed for, it could not perform in the long term if it costs
the countries too much.
Compliance and verii cation: when studying international environ-
mental agreements and their ef ectiveness, Ausubel and Victor (1992)
introduce the importance of verii cation of compliance. They suggest that
verii able international environmental agreements have more chances to
have successful negotiation procedures and thereafter are more likely to be
implemented properly by the participants. They dei ne verii cation as 'the
process determining whether or not a party is in compliance' (p. 4) and note
that it has not been regarded as a signii cant aspect of most international
environmental issues to date. In order to fuli l this criterion the creation of
large costly new international or national organizational infrastructures is
necessary, which in most cases has not been done, so most of the formal
information under the regimes is collected, if indeed it is, by national
organizations already existing before the regime was established. In many
