Do International Environmental Treaties Work? How Parties to Treaties on Hazardous Substances Measure Their Effectiveness

In a current book project, we develop and apply a new analytical framework for studying how parties to global environmental treaties evaluate their effectiveness. 

While previous literature sought to conceptualize and define treaty effectiveness in specific ways, we take an empirically-grounded approach and study how treaty parties themselves in the four areas of stratospheric ozone depletion, persistent organic pollutants (POPs), mercury, and climate change have conducted effectiveness evaluations. 

In this seminar presentation, we introduce our four-step analytical framework and use it to examine how the parties to the Stockholm Convention on POPs have carried out multiple rounds of effectiveness evaluations with the aim of better understanding whether the treaty is working. 

We also detail how the parties to the Minamata Convention on Mercury that are currently carrying out the first effectiveness evaluation of that treaty build on approaches developed during the Stockholm Convention effectiveness evaluations. In our framework, the first step, agreement, looks at the adoption of treaty objectives and provisions. The second step, translation, explores how parties select indicators related to treaty objectives and provisions for effectiveness evaluation. The third step, attribution, focuses on how parties use indicators to assess whether treaty implementation has led to desired changes. The fourth step, reformulation, details how parties use insights from effectiveness evaluations to adjust treaty objectives and provisions. In our analysis, we focus specifically on aspects of “what,” “how” and “whom” of effectiveness evaluations. 

We find that treaty effectiveness evaluations vary in design and how they are carried out, and are best understood as political and dynamic processes that treaty parties having both shared and individual interests use as collective accountability mechanisms. In addition, we draw lessons from our comparative analysis with the ultimate aspiration of developing useful knowledge that can be applied towards improving the ability of international environmental treaty-based cooperation to inform and advance sustainability transitions on a human-dominated planet. 

ABOUT THE SPEAKERS

Henrik Selin is Professor of International Relations in the Frederick S. Pardee School of Global Studies at Boston University. His research focuses on international environmental cooperation and policy-making in a broader context of advancing sustainable development. He is the author of Mercury Stories: Understanding Sustainability through a Volatile Element (MIT Press, with Noelle Eckley Selin), European Union Environmental Governance (Routledge, with Stacy VanDeveer) and Global Governance of Hazardous Chemicals: Challenges of Multilevel Management (MIT Press). He is the co-editor of Changing Climates in North American Politics: Institutions, Policy Making and Multilevel Governance (MIT Press, with Stacy VanDeveer) and Transatlantic Environment and Energy Politics: Comparative and International Perspectives (Ashgate, with Miranda Schreurs and Stacy VanDeveer). In addition, he is the author and co-author of over fifty peer reviewed journal articles and book chapters as well as numerous reports, reviews, and commentaries. He is also an Editor of the journal Global Environmental Politics (MIT Press).

Noelle Eckley Selin is Professor in the Institute for Data, Systems and Society and the Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences, and the Director of MIT’s Center for Sustainability Science and Strategy (CS3). She previously served as Interim Director of MIT’s Institute for Data, Systems, and Society (2023-2024), and as director of MIT’s Technology and Policy Program from 2018-2023. Her research uses modeling and analysis to inform sustainability decision-making, focusing on issues involving air pollution, climate change and hazardous substances such as mercury. Her work has also addressed interactions between science and policy in international environmental negotiations.  She received her PhD and M.A. (Earth and Planetary Sciences) and B.A. (Environmental Science and Public Policy) from Harvard University. She is the recipient of a U.S. National Science Foundation CAREER award (2011), and is a Hans Fischer Senior Fellow at the Technical University of Munich Institute for Advanced Study (2018-2021), a Carl Friedrich von Siemens Research Awardee of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation (2024), and an American Association for the Advancement of Science Fellow (2024).

Event co-organised with the Global Governance Center.