International Environmental Agreements

There has been an exponential growth in international environmental treaty-making over the past fifty years, to the point of ‘treaty congestion’ - with a total of more than 1,300 multilateral (global and regional) agreements on the topic and close to 3,000 bilateral ones currently in force. This research review addresses this phenomenon from a variety of disciplinary perspectives: international law, political science, and ‘ecological economics’. The objective is comparative analysis, with a view to identifying common features and common problems of transnational environmental regimes, in light of their historical evolution, their application and effectiveness in practice, and possible lessons learned in their institutional ‘interplay’ with each other.