Global agreements to mitigate climate change, conserve biodiversity, or combat desertification typically take center stage in scholarly discussions about international environmental politics. Even though the United Nations Environment Programme reported 10 years ago that regional agreements make up two-thirds of all international treaties, regional cooperation has by comparison either received scant attention or been conceptually and empirically lumped together with global treaties. This lack of knowledge about the historical and current scope of regional governance is a serious obstacle to understanding the architecture of global environmental governance and to overcoming current bottlenecks in international environmental cooperation. In response, we report on the outcome of a descriptive analysis that complements the most comprehensive database on international environmental agreements (iea.uoregon.edu) with variables for analysis at the regional level. We introduce a multidimensional typology of regional agreements based on contiguous/noncontiguous agreement membership, contiguous/noncontiguous spatial ambit, and whether membership and ambit are adjoining and/or coextensive. We discuss the theoretical and empirical relevance of the different types of agreements and the nature and prevalence of special cases. Given the previous lack of research in this area, our primary purpose is to present a systematic account of regional environmental governance, leaving causal analysis to our own and others’ future research. Our analysis, nevertheless, helps us to identify a number of knowledge gaps and analytical directions in the conclusion.
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Varying according to author and discipline, a region can be understood as a subnational entity that is embedded within an overarching administrative and political unit (microregions) (Allen and Cochrane 2007) but which can also have a cross-border dimension (Söderbaum 2005); others, most prominently in IR, assume that regions consist at least of two states, but can also take on continental extensions (macroregions) (cf. Buzan and Waever 2003; Cantori and Spiegel 1970; Warleigh-Lack 2008).
An important example is the International Regimes Database (IRD) (Breitmeier et al. 2006). Among the regimes included in the IRD are distinctly regional regimes such as the Antarctic Regime, the Danube River Protection Regime, and the Inter American Tropical Tuna Regime. While their database includes factors such as “tensions among individual members,” the spatial element of these tensions gets lost.
Logical noncases are types 3, 7, 11 and 15, where contiguous membership and spatial ambit with fully or partially coextensive membership and ambit imply that membership and ambit would also need to be adjoining. Empirical noncases are types 5b, 6, and 14, though the European Union Habitats Directive would be a likely candidate for Type 5 (contiguous membership with coextensive but noncontiguous spatial ambit).
We cover the years 1945–2005 because data on bilateral agreements have not been collected systematically since 2005 (Ron Mitchell, personal communication).
The IEA database defines an IEA as “an intergovernmental document intended as legally binding with a primary stated purpose of preventing or managing human impacts on natural resources”; “international” refers to agreements involving two or more governments; “agreements” are instruments in which states consent to be bound; and “environmental” refers to agreements in which the prevention of human impact on the environment is the primary purpose (Mitchell 2002 –2013).
The initial coding of more than 2,000 agreements was subject to a carefully designed, iterative intercoder reliability test protocol. Random rechecking and recoding eventually covered approximately 25 percent of the data set.
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The authors would like to thank Ron Mitchell for providing support with the underlying data for the present analysis, and Ron Mitchell, Stacy VanDeveer, and two anonymous reviewers for their comments on the manuscript. Special thanks go to Niko Steinhoff and Elisa Wege, research assistants at the German Institute of Global and Area Studies (GIGA), for assisting with coding and validating the data. The authors further thank GIGA for its support for this initiative and the Swiss State Secretariat for Education, Research and Innovation for its financial support to the COST Action IS 0802 project “Ecoregional Territorialization: Rescaling Environmental Governance.”
Author information Authors and AffiliationsDepartment of Geography and Environment, University of Geneva, Unimail, 40 Boulevard du Pont-d’Arve, 1211, Geneva, Switzerland
Jörg Balsiger
Institute for Environmental Sciences, University of Geneva, Geneva, Switzerland
Jörg Balsiger
German Institute of Global and Area Studies, Neuer Jungfernstieg 21, 20354, Hamburg, Germany
Miriam Prys
Correspondence to Jörg Balsiger.
About this article Cite this articleBalsiger, J., Prys, M. Regional agreements in international environmental politics. Int Environ Agreements 16, 239–260 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10784-014-9256-3
Accepted: 09 May 2014
Published: 16 May 2014
Issue Date: April 2016
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10784-014-9256-3
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