| Summary: | To determine what legal instruments need to be formulated and institutions created to manage a global commons, it is first necessary to investigate the various functions that the proposed management regime or regimes are to carry out. This article considers what functions might be assigned to an international regime to manage the threat of climatic change resulting from the "greenhouse effect. " It then examines what instruments would be required to initiate the regime and what other instruments it may be expected to create as well as what institutions would be required to carry out the various processes. These requirements in terms of legal instruments and institutions would be essentially the same whether it is decided to establish a single regime to manage all global commons or, for practical or political reasons, to have separate regimes- for example, for the atmosphere, for space, for the seas, for land-based activities, and for the Antarctic.
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