Disaggregating International Regimes: A New Approach to Evaluation and Comparison

8. Conclusions

Conclusions 8 The aim of this book has been twofold: to develop a disaggregate approach to international regime effectiveness that can improve the balance among concerns for validity, determinacy, and generality, and to apply the approach to a specific case, the regime for managing shared fish stocks in the Barents Sea. The first two chapters addressed international regimes generally in the sense that the concepts, theories, and methods used and explained there should apply to any international regime. Chapter 1 gave a brief overview of international regime analysis and its place in the broader study of governance. I endorsed the mainstream definition of an effective regime as one that contributes significantly to solving the basic problem it is intended to address. We also noted that, for many international regimes, the basic problem can be decomposed into cognitional, regulatory, and behavioral aspects—and that such decomposition offers substantial advantages for regime-effectiveness analysis. The chapter then outlined the research design of the study and pinpointed its distinctive features. In chapter 2 I examined in greater depth some key methodological challenges in regime-effectiveness analysis—in particular, how to measure effectiveness, the need for sound counterfactual analysis, and methods for substantiating causal connections. The chapter developed a distinctive way of dealing with these challenges, using findings from the analysis of variation in problem solving to show what the level of problem solving would most plausibly have been if the regime had not existed. Causal analysis requires good models of the factors that drive or impede problem solving, so I briefly reviewed some theoretical approaches and variables identified in previous research on regime effectiveness. Central to the disaggregate approach is counterfactual path analysis, which examines the properties of drivers of and impediments to problem solving most likely without a regime—a task far more manageable than estimating the 262 Chapter 8 counterfactual outcome directly. Counterfactual path analysis helps substantiate the outcome estimate whenever the combination of causal properties that would apply with no regime is shown in the empirical analysis to reliably deliver either high or low scores on problem solving. The disaggregate approach to international regime effectiveness advanced here combines such counterfactual path analysis with a yardstick for measuring effectiveness according to the difference the regime makes compared with the counterfactual no-regime situation, as well as the situation in which the problem is fully solved. The subsequent five chapters applied this disaggregate approach to the international regime for managing shared fish stocks in the Barents Sea. In chapter 3 I described the activity system that the regime seeks to influence, as well as the national and international structures for fisheries management in the region. Each of chapters 4 to 6 applied my new approach to one of the general aspects of problem solving, demonstrating how useful a set-theoretic comparative technique, fuzzy set QCA, can be in identifying reliable paths to success or failure. Applying the same technique, I moved in chapter 7 from the parts to the whole by using the partial effectiveness assessments of preceding chapters to bring out their interaction in solving the basic problem of concern: resource management , or the balancing of utilization and conservation. That chapter summarized the empirical findings on the aggregate effectiveness of the Barents Sea fisheries regime. This concluding chapter looks beyond the case of Barents Sea fisheries. The next section reviews briefly the experience with using the disaggregate approach, commenting on its applicability to regimes in other issue areas.Then I summarize my findings regarding the conditions that appear to influence success or failure on each aspect of the problem, examining how they relate to the results of previous studies of regime effectiveness. From those findings, the final section derives a set of implications for earth system governance. Using the Disaggregate Approach The approach to international regime effectiveness advanced here aims to make the analysis tractable, transparent, and readily comparable across regimes. Here we should recall two tasks that any assessment of regime effectiveness must tackle, relating to causality and adequacy. The causality task entails substantiating whether the state of the problem addressed by the regime would have been significantly different if the Conclusions 263 regime had not existed (Young 2001, 100), while the adequacy task entails evaluating any such difference according to an appropriate standard (Underdal 1992, 230). The most sophisticated way to measure regime effectiveness so far, the so-called Oslo-Potsdam formula, achieves higher validity than others...