Negotiating a New Design for a World Ocean Regime

In a study assessing the effectiveness of international environmental regimes published in 2002 the authors chose to exclude the negotiations of the Third United Nations Conference on the Law of the Sea as a case study because it was not an environmental regime per se and because the conference was far too complex to be useful as a control case. The present essay applies the analytic structure of the environmental regime effectiveness study to the UNLCOS III negotiations to assess what value, if any, would now be added to a comprehensive analysis of those negotiations. The findings are that the approach of my previous research on UNCLOS III would have been considerably tightened by such an application and a much more nuanced and evolutionary analysis would have been possible on the variable of problem type in which malignancy first increased but later decreased.