Jon Hovi

The Oslo-Potsdam Solution to Measuring Regime Effectiveness: Critique, Response, and the Road Ahead

In international regimes research, one of the most important questions is how effective regimes are in delivering what they were established and designed to achieve. Perhaps the most explicit and rigorous formula for measuring regime effectiveness is the so-called Oslo-Potsdam solution. This formula has recently been criticized by Oran Young, himself one of the founding fathers of regime analysis. The present article reviews and responds to his critique and provides several extensions of the Oslo-Potsdam solution. Our response may be summarized in three points. First, we recognize that difficult problems remain unsolved. Second, we argue that for some of the most profound problems there is no escape; we need to engage in counterfactual reasoning, and we need some notion of the best solution achievable (such as the collective optimum). Finally, we would welcome efforts to further develop and refine the Oslo-Potsdam formula as well as alternative approaches.

The Persistence of the Kyoto Protocol: Why Other Annex I Countries Move on Without the United States

The United States, the worlds largest emitter of greenhouse gases, is not going to ratify the Kyoto Protocol in the foreseeable future. Yet, a number of countries have decided to stay on the Kyoto track. Four main explanations for this apparent puzzle are considered. The first is that remaining Annex I countries still expect the Kyoto Protocol to reduce global warming sufficiently to outweigh the economic costs of implementation. The second is that the parties, by implementing the treaty, hope to induce non-parties to follow suit at some later stage. A third hypothesis is that EU climate institutions have generated a momentum that has made a change of course difficult. Finally, Kyotos persistence may be linked to the European Unions desire to stand forth as an international leader in the field of climate politics. We conclude that the first two explanations have little explanatory power, but find the latter two more promising.

Implementing Long-Term Climate Policy: Time Inconsistency, Domestic Politics, International Anarchy

As a quintessential long-term policy problem, climate change poses two major challenges. The first is to develop, under considerable uncertainty, a plan for allocating resources over time to achieve an effective policy response. The second is to implement this plan, once arrived at, consistently over time. We consider the second of these two challenges, arguing that it consists of three interrelated, commitment problemsthe time inconsistency problem, the domestic politics problem, and the anarchy problem. We discuss each of these commitment problems in some detail, explore how they relate to climate policy, and suggest institutional designs that may help limit their adverse impact. While each of these commitment problems is difficult to tackle on its own, climate change requires us to cope with all of them at once. This is likely one major reason why we have so far made only modest headway on this vital issue.

When Do (Imposed) Economic Sanctions Work

Previous research has documented only a modest success rate for imposed sanctions. By contrast, the success rate is higher in cases that are settled at the threat stage. In this article, the authors provide new insights about the circumstances under which sanctions cause behavioral change only after being imposed. First, the target must initially underestimate the impact of sanctions, miscalculate the senders determination to impose them, or wrongly believe that sanctions will be imposed and maintained whether it yields or not. Second, the targets misperceptions must be corrected after sanctions are imposed. A game-theoretical model with incomplete information is used to develop and clarify the argument.

Why the United States did not become a party to the Kyoto Protocol: German, Norwegian, and US perspectives

According to two-level game theory, negotiators tailor agreements at the international level to be ratifiable at the domestic level. This did not happen in the Kyoto negotiations, however, in the US case. We interviewed 26 German, Norwegian, and US participants in and observers of the climate negotiations concerning their views on three explanations for why the United States did not become a party to Kyoto. Explanation 1 argues that Kyoto delegations mistakenly thought the Senate was bluffing when adopting Byrd–Hagel. Explanation 2 contends that Europeans preferred a more ambitious agreement without US participation to a less ambitious agreement with US participation. Finally, explanation 3 suggests that in Kyoto the Clinton–Gore administration gave up on Senate ratification, and essentially pushed for an agreement that would provide them a climate-friendly face. While all explanations received some support from interviewees, explanation 1 and (particularly) explanation 3 received considerably more support than explanation 2.

Regime Effectiveness and the Oslo-Potsdam Solution: A Rejoinder to Oran Young

Fromourpoint of view, the exchange has been very rewarding. In this rejoinder, we brie‘ ysummarize our own position and identify some remaining issues where ourviews seem to differ from Oran Young’ s.First, we are encouraged by Young’ s evaluation that there are some attrac-tive features about the Oslo-Potsdam solution— in particular that it offers a con-ceptual framework producing a single effectiveness score bounded between 0and 1 which permits comparisons across regimes.Second, Young is correct in pointing out that there are multiple alternativeprocedures for evaluating regime

Implementing the climate regime : international compliance

Preface * Notes on Contributors * Acronyms and Abbreviations * Introduction and Main Findings * Part I: The Kyoto Compliance Regime: Emergence and Design * The Negotiation of a Kyoto Compliance System * The Kyoto Compliance System: Towards Hard Enforcement * Part II: Challenges to Effective Operation of the Compliance Regime * Flexibility, Compliance and Norm Development in the Climate Regime * Reporting and Verification of Emissions and Removals of Greenhouse Gases * Effective Enforcement and Double-edged Deterrents: How the Impacts of Sanctions also Affect Complying Parties * Part III: External Enforcement - Parties and Non-parties * The Pros and Cons of External Enforcement * Trade Measures, WTO and Climate Compliance: The Interplay of International Regimes * Part IV: Compliance, NGOs and International Governance * The Role of Green NGOs in Promoting Climate Compliance * Major Oil Companies in Climate Policy: Strategies and Compliance * Enhancing Climate Compliance - What are the Lessons to Learn from Environmental Regimes and the EU? * Epilogue: The Future of Kyotos Compliance System * Index

US presidents and the failure to ratify multilateral environmental agreements

Whereas the US President signed the Kyoto Protocol, the failure of the US Congress to ratify it seriously hampered subsequent international climate cooperation. This recent US trend, of signing environmental treaties but failing to ratify them, could thwart attempts to come to a future climate agreement. Two complementary explanations of this trend are proposed. First, the political system of the US has distinct institutional features that make it difficult for presidents to predict whether the Senate will give its advice and consent to multilateral environmental agreements (MEAs) and whether Congress will pass the required enabling legislation. Second, elected for a fixed term, US presidents might benefit politically from supporting MEAs even when knowing that legislative support is not forthcoming. Four policy implications are explored, concerning the scope for unilateral presidential action, the potential for bipartisan congressional support, the effectiveness of a treaty without the US, and the prospects for a deep, new climate treaty. Policy relevance Why does the failure of US ratification of multilateral environmental treaties occur? This article analyses the domestic political mechanisms involved in cases of failed US ratification. US non-participation in global environmental institutions often has serious ramifications. For example, it sharply limited Kyotos effectiveness and seriously hampered international climate negotiations for years. Although at COP 17 in Durban the parties agreed to negotiate a new agreement by 2015, a new global climate treaty may well trigger a situation resembling the one President Clinton faced in 1997 when he signed Kyoto but never obtained support for it in the Senate. US failure to ratify could thwart future climate agreements.

Emission trading: Participation enforcement determines the need for compliance enforcement

We identify and explain significant differences between the compliance enforcement systems of three cap-and-trade programmes: the European Union’s Emission Trading Scheme (EU-ETS), the US SO2 emission trading programme and the Kyoto Protocol. Because EU-ETS’s compliance enforcement system is somewhat less potent than that of US SO2, but vastly more potent than Kyoto’s, it might be tempting to predict that EU-ETS will (1) not quite achieve the SO2 programme’s near-perfect compliance rates, yet (2) achieve significantly better compliance rates than Kyoto. However, we offer a novel theoretical framework suggesting that how compliance enforcement affects compliance will depend on how the emission trading programme addresses participation. We conclude that while (1) will likely prove correct, (2) will not; Kyoto may even outperform EU-ETS compliance-wise because whereas EU-ETS (and US SO2) specify mandatory participation, most Kyoto member countries participate voluntarily.

The Limits of the Law of the Least Ambitious Program

Arild Underdals work on the Law of the Least Ambitious Program (LLAP) is a significant contribution to our understanding of the logic of international collaboration. The LLAP, however, applies only under particular conditions. After comparing the law to the joint decision trap and the veto player concept, we discuss four observations that tend to limit the laws domain. First, while the LLAP is intended to apply to decision-making under unanimity, in a number of international bodies decisions are made by some kind of majority voting. Second, the LLAP assumes that the alternative to collective agreement is individual decision-making, yet in practice the relevant alternative (the reversion rule) is often the continuation of some pre-existing collaborative arrangement. Third, whereas the LLAP assumes that the unanimity rule invariably favors the least ambitious program, there are interesting cases where this assumption does not hold. Finally, the LLAP does not take into account that the outcome of international decision-making not only depends on the decision rule and the reversion rule, but also on the voting sequence.