Understanding the Design of International Environmental Regulations: The Concept of Stringency

• Main Author: Hofmann, Benjamin
• Format: Conference Object
• Language: English
• Published: 2017
• Subjects: law; political science; Arctic
• Online Access: http://www.alexandria.unisg.ch/250171/

The paper develops a new empirically based concept of stringency to capture the formal and substantive design of public international environmental regulations. It is argued that both the form and substance of regulations matter for eliciting compliance and for their effectiveness. Existing typologies of regulatory design from International Relations, International Law, and Economics do not address these dimensions comprehensively and systematically enough, or are not yet operationalized. Stringency is defined here as the product of the formal tightness and substantive ambition of regulations. Tightness refers to the legality, precision, and monitoring and enforcement system of a regulation. Ambition covers changes in substantive scope, as well as in the level of requirements compared to prior regulation, and to regulation elsewhere on the globe. Indicators are proposed to operationalize each of the six sub-dimensions. A two-tiered, multi-dimensional stringency index is constructed to aggregate the sub-dimension scores on an ordinal scale. The continuum from stringent to lax regulations is illustrated with empirical examples from the area of international environmental regulations of maritime industries in the Arctic. Stringent regulations remain in many contexts the final aim of regulatory trajectories, but international regulators can choose from different design blends to pave ways towards them. The concept of regulatory stringency invites new research on the drivers of international environmental regulation, on its relation with globalization processes, and on its political, economic and ecological effects.