Effectiveness of International Environmental Institutions

Do international institutions matter? How do they matter? These are central questions in International Relations Theory. Studies of international environmental cooperation have contributed key insights to our understanding of international institutions. Three recent volumes continue to do so. Contributing to the research agenda in the broader literature on international institutions, these books seek to shed light on the causal pathways by which international institutions make a difference. This essay discusses common themes as well as some tension in these volumes. It concludes with some persistent challenges facing the literature on international institutions. Analyzing International Environmental Regimes, co-authored by Helmut Breitmeier, Oran R. Young, and Michael Zürn, recognizes an important challenge to the study of international regimes. Although empirical analysis of environmental regimes is abundant, most of this analysis happens through self-contained case studies. The absence of a truly comparative mode of analysis may hamper our ability to demonstrate causal inouence of environmental regimes. To meet this challenge, this book unveils the International Regimes Database (IRD), along with selected analyses of regime effects using the database. The IRD seeks to enable systematic empirical research on international regimes. It collects data from expert coders—guided by a common data protocol—on many features of individual regimes. The database consists of information on each environmental regime along four dimensions: regime formation, regime attributes, regime consequences, and regime dynamics. The database can be ex-