Understanding Institutional Change in International Environmental Regimes

Histories of regime theory often characterize research during the 1980s as being focused on whether regimes matter and, during the 1990s, as being focused more on how they matter and what makes them (in)effective. Today, constructivist theorists of organizational power and principal-agent theorists concerned with the difficulties that agent strategies can create in contracting, though they may agree on little else, are in complete agreement that institutions, once established, are unlikely to persist forever in their initial state. For scholars of international environmental regimes, the need to understand institutional change has taken on even greater urgency, given the rapidly growing web of legal commitments and institutions that have been created in recent decades. While few would lament the global environment's rise to prominence on the international agenda, it is far from clear what consequences growing institutional proliferation will have for the future of environmental governance. There is good reason for the discipline's current concern with institutional change.

Few scholars are as well placed as Oran Young to comment on these developments. In Institutional Dynamics Young makes the case that we should view environmental and resource regimes through the prisms of complexity and systems theory. Such approaches need not be relegated to the study of natural-physical systems; Young argues that they are equally valuable for understanding social systems. Accordingly, Young proposes to study institutional change in terms of the various stresses (both internal and external) that confront environmental regimes, and the corresponding resiliency of regimes in the face of such stressors.

His central theoretical contribution is the "endogenous-exogenous alignment thesis." Regime dynamics are driven, first and foremost, by the degree of fit between regime characteristics and their environment, which is to be understood both in biophysical and socioeconomic terms. Endogenous, regime-specific characteristics include decision rules, institutional flexibility, monitoring, administrative capacity, and resources. Exogenous features range from political and economic (dis)continuity to problem attributes and state changes in relevant biophysical systems. The interaction between endogenous and exogenous factors in a given regime determines, in large part, how that regime will change over time. When the two are aligned, regime change is more likely to take on a more functionally desirable character. When they are substantially misaligned, regressive change and even collapse become more likely.

Young identifies five "emergent" patterns of regime change: progressive development, arrested development, punctuated equilibrium, diversion, and collapse. Progressive development is most likely when a regime faces few setbacks. It is characterized by the continual strengthening of the regime's ability to perform the function that motivated its creation. One common institutional form that progressive development takes is the "framework convention—protocol" approach to international environmental law (although Young does not argue that this institutional form necessarily yields progressive development). The international regime to protect stratospheric ozone illustrates this pattern of change. The emergent pattern of "arrested development" applies to regimes that "fail to live up to their promise," because they cannot overcome barriers to progress (p. 10). The paradigmatic case of arrested development, according to Young, is the international regime for global climate. "Punctuated equilibrium" is marked by continued, successful adjustment to new challenges. Such regimes therefore exhibit continued effectiveness in responding to the problems that motivated their creation, as opposed to the steady advance that is characteristic of progressive regimes. Young offers the Antarctic Treaty System as a paradigmatic case of this pattern of change. Regimes that undergo substantial functional transformation, such as the international whaling regime's transformation from conservation to preservation, exhibit a pattern of "divergence." Finally, some regimes begin by successfully providing a certain function, but later face shocks to which they are unable to respond. Such regimes (e.g., Northern Fur Seals) are prone to a pattern of change that Young labels, simply, "collapse."

In articulating his main argument, reviewing...