Regime, the State and Society: Analyzing the Implementation of International Environmental Commitments

In this paper, the relationship between international regimes, states, and societies is examined. The interactions between these levels moderate the influence of international agreements and rules on behavior: they help determine when international agreements are effective. The paper offers one major context for studying the domestic implementation of international agreements, and for developing theories that explain how international agreements influence down to the local level. The authors review and develop numerous hypotheses about the factors that explain successful domestic implementation, and the balance of the roles of the state and non-state actors (e.g. NGOs). The main perspective they propose is one that concentrates on "access" to and "participation" in the policy-making and implementation process as a fruitful way to unravel the main factors that explain effectiveness, as well as the major policy tools available to improve effectiveness of international environmental agreements. The authors also review literature in important fields: domestic public policy implementation, international regimes, and the concept of "compliance"

Policy monitoring in the EU: The impact of institutions, implementation, and quality

Policy monitoring is often seen as a crucial ingredient of policy evaluation, but theoretically informed empirical analyses of real-world policy monitoring practices are still rare. This paper addresses this gap by focusing on climate policy monitoring in the European Union, which has a relatively stringent system of greenhouse gas monitoring but a much less demanding approach to monitoring policies. It explores how institutional settings, policy implementation, and the quality of information may impact the practices and politics of policy monitoring. Drawing on quantitative regression models and qualitative interviews, it demonstrates that policy monitoring has evolved over time and is itself subject to implementation pressures, but also exhibits learning effects that improve its quality. In further developing both everyday policy monitoring practices and academic understanding of them, there is a need to pay attention to their design—specifically, the impact of any overarching rules, the institutional support for implementation, and the criteria governing the quality of the information they deliver. In short, policy monitoring should be treated as a governance activity in its own right, raising many different design challenges

Governance and Environmental Policy Integration in Europe: What Can We Learn from the EU Emission Trading Scheme?

The European Union Emission Trading System (EU ETS) is a landmark environmental policy, representing the worlds first large-scale greenhouse gas (GHG) trading program. The coexistence of state actors and top-down processes with stakeholders participation and flexible abatement strategies make the EU ETS a powerful instrument of cross sectoral integration of environmental concerns, which benefits from a high level of interaction among the actors involved and a significant degree of information exchange. However, the same peculiarities of the system make it difficult to identify a correspondence with a single mode of governance. The EU ETS shows characteristics of the decision making processes and institutions engaged, the tools and instruments used as well as the actors involved, which change according to the different levels of governance, and belong both to the old and to the new modes of governance. The emission trading scheme represents a clear example of Multi-Level governance, where the different modes of governance interact among them and affect each other

Interaction between EU carbon trading and the international climate regime: synergies and learning

EU climate policy, Emissions trading, ETS, National allocation plans, Kyoto Protocol, Clean Development Mechanism, Interaction,