Explaining compliance: what makes the pollutor turn green? an event history analysis of the member state compliance with the Montreal Protocol
Master thesis
Permanent lenke
https://hdl.handle.net/1956/4909Utgivelsesdato
2010-10-04Metadata
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Sammendrag
This thesis seeks to explore which structural factors that move member states into compliance with International Environmental Agreements (IEAs). The research question is: under what conditions do members to an international environmental agreement comply with their commitments?" Previous conducted studies on environmental accords have focused mainly on institutional treaty characteristics when explaining variance in compliance. The interest in regime factors has led to a focus on overall compliance more than on understanding member state compliance records. This lack of attention to the importance of extralegal factors to member state compliance with environmental agreements has been a motivation for this thesis. As this thesis is exploratory by nature, the theoretical framework takes a broad approach, introducing country-specific determinants that are hypothesised to influence a state's environmental record. To test the hypotheses, an event history analysis of signatory state compliance with the Montreal Protocol is conducted. 154 member states' event histories between 1989 and 2008 are analysed and compared. The results show that as a signatory state's length of protocol membership increases, regional compliance records improve and its general welfare rises, the associate has significantly better chances of experiencing compliance with the Montreal Protocol than a member state not inhabiting such features. Nonetheless, a powerful member state is significantly less likely to adhere to the Montreal accord obligations. From these findings, the effect of regional compliance is especially intriguing as it is poorly theorised in the literature. Furthermore, the analysis shows that several of the most theorised covariates fail to affect the propensity for compliance on the Montreal Protocol. Most surprising is the finding that neither political regime nor the scope of active ENGOs affects compliance rates significantly. The results from this analysis indicate that one can not fully understand the variation in compliance with the Montreal Protocol without taking factors external to the environmental accords into consideration.