In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Reviewed by:
  • The Legitimacy of International Regimes
  • Matthew J. Hoffmann
Breitmeier, Helmut. 2008. The Legitimacy of International Regimes. Burlington, VT: Ashgate Publishing Company.

Breitmeier's book seeks to recast our understanding of international regimes and global order, arguing that legitimacy concerns are, and must be, an increasingly prominent aspect of designing international regimes. This is an ambitious study, impressive in its scope and empirical breadth. It aims for advances on theoretical, empirical, methodological, and even normative dimensions.

The set up and execution of the analysis is tantalizing in its potential, but following the analytic narrative is somewhat challenging due to the mixing of normative goals and empirical claims in the initial chapters. The book's foundation is overtly normative: legitimacy concerns must be an increasingly important component of establishing social order in the global sphere. This need for legitimacy has arisen because the march of "global juridification or legalization" (p. 3) has enhanced the impact of international institutions on the domestic sphere, with significant consequences for democracy and the autonomy/sovereignty of nation-states. Thus, if we expect or want international environmental regimes to work, achieving legitimate grounds for obedience with their dictates is of paramount importance. The conditions necessary for achieving legitimate regimes is the empirical target of analysis. Breitmeier hypothesizes that "only if non-state actors can develop political activities and give effect to their problem-solving potential, it will be possible to improve the legitimacy of global governance systems" (p. 3). He brings the International Regimes Database (IRD) to bear to interrogate this hypothesis. He proposes to answer two questions with data that span a wide range of environmental regimes: "Did institutional mechanisms contribute to improving the legitimacy of international institutions? How far can non-state actors have an effect on the legitimacy of international environmental regimes?" (p. 2).

The first step in addressing these questions is to define and operationalize legitimacy. Breitmeier combines input and output notions of legitimacy in considering five grounds that justify obedience with the strictures of environmental regimes. Regimes are legitimate when they (1) reduce uncertainty (knowledge of problems and solutions); (2) increase the chance of compliance with regime rules; (3) help solve environmental problems; (4) have equitable distributional consequences; and (5) allow for participation of nonstate actors. One could [End Page 118] quibble with this list or the combining of input and output measures of legitimacy with equal weighting, but Breitmeier performs a laudable service in delineating clearly the scope of a perennially fuzzy concept. The second preparatory step is describing the IRD data and methods of analysis. The IRD is an unprecedented attempt to code environmental regimes in a way that allows for systematic comparison. It contains significant data on 23 regimes. Breitmeier describes the process of delineating individual regimes, justifying the cut-off date of 1998 for picking cases, breaking down regimes into regime elements and watershed events, and coding. The coding of regimes is especially interesting—each regime (with two exceptions) was coded by two case study experts drawn from academic ranks, producing both quantitative data and qualitative narratives.

The five empirical chapters analyze each ground for legitimacy across the 23 environmental regimes. For each, Breitmeier establishes a descriptive baseline, before turning to more analytic tasks. For instance, chapter 6 begins by examining whether the nature of the problems and policy options that regimes address are well understood, and if that understanding has changed over time (measuring how or if regimes reduce uncertainty). He then assesses whether the regimes had a causal impact on change in understanding (how many regimes were coded by the experts as having such an impact), how mechanisms employed by regimes correlate with change in understanding (crosstabulating experts coding on regimes' causal impact and the mechanisms employed), and whether nonstate actors had an impact on changed understanding. Perhaps not surprisingly, for each source of legitimate obedience, Breitmeier finds that regime mechanisms are important (with some significant variation across regimes and bases of legitimacy) for enhancing the legitimacy claims of regimes, and that nonstate actors do have an important, though not paramount, impact on the mechanisms that enhance the legitimacy of environmental regimes. Thus Breitmeier claims that the prime hypothesis is at least partially confirmed...

pdf

Share