How to Improve Multilateral Environmental Agreements:A Case Study in Balanced Institutional Design Mechanisms in the Climate Change and Ozone Regime

With climate change being one of the largest existential threat’s civilizations has ever faced and global cooperation the only conceivable solution, why have the existing MEAs of the climate change regime failed? Moreover, why have MEAs in other environmental regimes, such as the ozone regime, been so much more successful than MEAs in the climate change regime? To investigate this question, I use a theoretical framework of international law and focus on the specific way the institutional design of agreements can yield greater success. I define success in a two-pronged manner which focuses on participation and compliance. This paper takes a comparative analysis between the ozone regime and climate change regime to dissect what specific features made the Montreal Protocol so much more successful than the Kyoto Protocol. I argue that international relations present one of the largest impediments to a meaningful solution. Furthermore, I argue that by balancing legal provisions of flexibility and compliance within an agreement such political obstacles can be surmounted. This paper concludes that while you cannot simply implant the blueprints of one successful MEA to another, especially across regimes, you can incorporate institutional design features which yield both increased ratification and adherence. This presents an opportunity for the Paris Agreement to build upon the successful features of the Montreal Protocol and incorporate design features which will allow for the continued strengthened of state commitments

How to Improve Multilateral Environmental Agreements: A Case Study in Balanced Institutional Design Mechanisms in the Climate Change and Ozone Regime

With climate change being one of the largest existential threat’s civilizations has ever faced and global cooperation the only conceivable solution, why have the existing MEAs of the climate change regime failed? Moreover, why have MEAs in other environmental regimes, such as the ozone regime, been so much more successful than MEAs in the climate change regime? To investigate this question, I use a theoretical framework of international law and focus on the specific way the institutional design of agreements can yield greater success. I define success in a two-pronged manner which focuses on participation and compliance. This paper takes a comparative analysis between the ozone regime and climate change regime to dissect what specific features made the Montreal Protocol so much more successful than the Kyoto Protocol. I argue that international relations present one of the largest impediments to a meaningful solution. Furthermore, I argue that by balancing legal provisions of flexibility and compliance within an agreement such political obstacles can be surmounted. This paper concludes that while you cannot simply implant the blueprints of one successful MEA to another, especially across regimes, you can incorporate institutional design features which yield both increased ratification and adherence. This presents an opportunity for the Paris Agreement to build upon the successful features of the Montreal Protocol and incorporate design features which will allow for the continued strengthened of state commitments

Organizational images : towards a model of organizations

Thesis (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Political Science, June 2012.Cataloged from PDF version of thesis.Includes bibliographical references (p. 93-94).This study develops a general theoretical framework for the analysis of organizational behavior by focusing on the notion that organizations develop unique information-processing frameworks, which it labels "organizational images" or "images of operations," that strongly determine their behavior. The model is then used to draw inferences about the forms of counterinsurgency strategies practiced by the US military in the second war in Iraq and the war in Afghanistan. The paper argues that militaries tend to view the tasks they undertake in terms of the coercive application of force, and that this tendency tends to determine the forms of counterinsurgency strategies they chose, leading them to eschew strategies that rely on bargaining with enemy forces. The purported dominance of this coercive "image of operations" is then investigated in military field reports from the war in Afghanistan.by Krishnan, Neel.S.M

Training of Crisis Mappers and Map Production from Multi-sensor Data: Vernazza Case Study (Cinque Terre National Park, Italy)

This aim of paper is to presents the development of a multidisciplinary project carried out by the cooperation between Politecnico di Torino and ITHACA (Information Technology for Humanitarian Assistance, Cooperation and Action). The goal of the project was the training in geospatial data acquiring and processing for students attending Architecture and Engineering Courses, in order to start up a team of "volunteer mappers". Indeed, the project is aimed to document the environmental and built heritage subject to disaster; the purpose is to improve the capabilities of the actors involved in the activities connected in geospatial data collection, integration and sharing. The proposed area for testing the training activities is the Cinque Terre National Park, registered in the World Heritage List since 1997. The area was affected by flood on the 25th of October 2011. According to other international experiences, the group is expected to be active after emergencies in order to upgrade maps, using data acquired by typical geomatic methods and techniques such as terrestrial and aerial Lidar, close-range and aerial photogrammetry, topographic and GNSS instruments etc.; or by non conventional systems and instruments such us UAV, mobile mapping etc. The ultimate goal is to implement a WebGIS platform to share all the data collected with local authorities and the Civil Protectio