Kal Raustiala

The Regime Complex for Plant Genetic Resources

This article examines the implications of the rising density of international institutions. Despite the rapid proliferation of institutions, scholars continue to embrace the assumption that individual regimes are decomposable from others. We contend that an increasingly common phenomenon is the “regime complex:†a collective of partially overlapping and nonhierarchical regimes. The evolution of regime complexes reflects the influence of legalization on world politics. Regime complexes are laden with legal inconsistencies because the rules in one regime are rarely coordinated closely with overlapping rules in related regimes. Negotiators often attempt to avoid glaring inconsistencies by adopting broad rules that allow for multiple interpretations. In turn, solutions refined through implementation of these rules focus later rounds of negotiation and legalization. We explore these processes using the issue of plant genetic resources (PGR). Over the last century, states have created property rights in these resources in a Demsetzian process: as new technologies and ideas have made PGR far more valuable, actors have mobilized and clashed over the creation of property rights that allow the appropriation of that value.We are grateful for comments on early drafts presented at Stanford Law School, New York University Law School, Duke Law School, Harvard Law School, and the American Society for International Law. Thanks especially to Larry Helfer, Tom Heller, Robert Keohane, Benedict Kingsbury, Peter Lallas, Lisa Martin, Ron Mitchell, Sabrina Safrin, Gene Skolnikoff, Richard Stewart, Chris Stone, Buzz Thompson, Jonathan Wiener, Katrina Wyman, Oran Young, and two anonymous reviewers for their feedback. Kal Raustiala thanks the Program on Law and Public Affairs at Princeton for support. We also thank our research assistants, Lindsay Carlson, Lesley Coben and Joshua House.

States, NGOs, and International Environmental Institutions

Nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) are increasingly important participants in international environmental institutions. NGOs have been formally—but not fully—incorporated into what were previously “states-only” activities. This article surveys these new participatory roles and offers an analytical framework for understanding the pattern, terms, and significance, for international theory, of NGO inclusion. NGOs are distinctive entities with important skills and resources to deploy in the process of international environmental cooperation. Rather than undermining state sovereignty, active NGO participation enhances the abilities of states to regulate globally. The empirical pattern of NGO participation has been structured across time and functional areas to reap these gains. Recent evidence from the restructuring of the World Banks Environment Facility is used to test these claims. That NGOs are now more pervasive in international environmental institutions illustrates the expansion, not the retreat, of the state in addressing global environmental problems.

Biodiversity Since Rio: The Future of the Convention on Biological Diversity

The case for protecting biodiversity has many dimensions. The direct economic returns - mainly in pharmaceuticals, agriculture, and biotechnology - are numerous, though prone to overstatement.(14) The number and value of drags such as aspirin and taxol (first identified in the wild but now synthesized) are likely to be small.(15) Examples abound of crop-threatening diseases such as wheat rust for which resistant strains were found in the wild, protected in gene banks, and crossbred into domesticated species. More productive and disease-resistant crop species have allowed agricultural production to grow faster than the human population even though the amount of land devoted to agriculture has remained roughly constant.(16) While many biodiversity-rich forests have been harvested for timber, a recent study of the Peruvian rain forest calculated that the net present value of sustainable rubber, fruit, and timber harvests is

Institutional Proliferation and the International Legal Order

6,820 per hectare - more than six times the mill value of clear-cut timber.(17) Sustainable uses that protect biodiversity can clearly be cost-effective, although the value of forests (which is based on location, markets, and products) may vary by a factor of 400.(18)

Governing the Internet

Since the cataclysm of World War II, the international order has grown increasingly institutionalized. Hundreds of international organizations and tens of thousands of treaties now exist, many with widespread – and in some cases nearly universal – membership. Compared to earlier eras, the international system today is far more densely populated by rules and institutions. This forthcoming chapter explores institutional density, the conflict and competition such density inevitably creates in an anarchical system of states, and the different ways international lawyers and political scientists address these issues. Is a dense international order a significant problem, a welcome development, or a largely superficial phenomenon? Is density an inadvertent outgrowth of intensifying interdependence, or a deliberate strategy? How does density vary – by issue area, over time, and across regions? These questions represent important lines of thinking that are either under way or incipient in the growing literature on institutional density. Part I (“The Rise of Institutional Density”) looks at the empirics of institutional density. Part II (“Density: Two Optics”) surveys the emerging scholarship in law and political science. Part III (“The Debate Over Density”) explores some fundamental questions at the heart of this emerging research field. Part IV concludes.

The Implementation and Effectiveness of International Environmental Commitments: Theory and Practice.

This essay explores why the United States is relinquishing an important source of power over the Internet, and what this means for both users of the Internet and scholars of global governance. The Internet began as a niche tool of engineers and academics, funded by the Department of Defense. Governance was loosely exercised by an insular group of enthusiasts and experts. By the 1990s, as the Internet grew rapidly, control was asserted more directly by the US government. Significant power was delegated to the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), a California non-profit. In June 2016, the Obama administration approved ICANN’s proposal for independent management of the critical “naming and numbering” function of the Internet. ICANN — governed by a complex multistakeholder structure that incorporates many non state actors — will directly control what is essentially the address book of the Internet. By delegating more autonomy to ICANN, the US will strengthen multistakeholderism, not just for ICANN, but as a broader principle of global governance. The Internet has been, over the past two decades, a central site of struggle between multistakeholderism and multilateralism. By relinquishing its role as primus inter pares among states, the US seemingly will lose an important source of power over the Internet. And yet even as its power is diminished, the achievement of its preferences will be strengthened. This somewhat paradoxical story has important lessons not only for the exercise of state power over the Internet but also for the evolution of global governance in a time when increasing numbers of nonstate actors across a range of international issues have achieved substantial participatory roles.