Conference Agenda

Global institutions sometimes endure relatively unchanged despite considerable changes in their external environment. Other institutions are built to change. Dynamism is an institutional design feature that allows these treaties to adapt to new circumstances. For some treaties, substantive amendments to the treaty can be made by a decision by the Conference of the Parties (COPs) without any need for lengthy procedures such as re-ratification. This paper uses the Mitchell database to show that this amendment procedure is present in 19% of all multilateral environmental agreements. While understudied, amendment procedures are characteristic of “living treaties” that can respond to new developments in the environmental issue that they address.

This paper investigates this potential by focusing on three living treaties, the Basel, Rotterdam, and Stockholm Conventions, which address different aspects of chemicals and waste. The Basel and Rotterdam Conventions manage transboundary movements of certain hazardous wastes and chemicals, respectively. The Stockholm Convention eliminates or restricts the production and use of persistent organic pollutants, among other related issues. The COPs of these treaties meet in tandem, negotiating and taking decisions concurrently. Yet, the politics of these living treaties vary. The Basel Convention has used its dynamism to address new waste streams, including ships, electronic waste, and plastics. The Rotterdam Convention struggles to list chemicals for prior informed consent, while the Stockholm Convention routinely lists new chemicals, including those widely used.

This paper argues that three trends associated with dynamic amendment procedures that, in turn, influence their effectiveness. First, political entrepreneurs can try to push or test how far the amendment procedures can be moved. This can lead to breakthrough decisions or lead some to question the legitimacy of the amendment procedures. Second, amendment procedures can expand the treaty’s scope and, in turn, its economic effects. This can entice some economic sectors to seek to block or undermine decisions. Third, living treaties can more easily claim jurisdiction in regime complexes. As a result, some actors could use these treaties as more convenient options to advance new issues. Alternatively, this could be a disincentive for implementation, as multiple rules could work against one another. Together, these three trends shape how living treaties respond to pressing and equally dynamic environmental issues.

Synergistic governance arrangements are often proposed as promising solutions to effectively navigate the normative and institutional fragmentation of the growing network of multilateral environmental agreements (MEAs). Yet, it is unclear whether such governance arrangements can offer effective tools to address problem-shifting, i.e., the negative spillover effects that flow from the design or implementation of one environmental regime to others. Synergistic arrangements between MEAs can involve different degrees of harmonization, ranging from mere sectoral coordination to integration of MEAs. An unprecedented integrated governance experiment that sits at the highest end of this spectrum corresponds to the normative and administrative integration of three MEAs on chemicals and waste. Also known as the BRS conventions, these are the 1989 Basel Convention on Control of Transboundary Movements of Hazardous Wastes and Their Disposal, the 1998 Rotterdam Convention on the Prior Informed Consent Procedure for Certain Hazardous Chemicals and Pesticides in International Trade, and the 2001 Stockholm Convention on Persistent Organic Pollutants. In the past nearly two decades, the BRS conventions have gradually institutionalized their coordination efforts through synergies decisions, a merged secretariat, and conferences of the parties that are held in joint and parallel sessions (also known as ‘TripleCOPs’). This experiment is unique in its institutional features, which aim to, among others, enhance efficiency in decision-making, strengthen implementation, and increase policy coherence. What remains to be determined is whether the BRS model had any effect on the problem shifts that have existed among these regimes prior to the integration process. These shifts result from the institutional and normative gaps, overlaps, and duplications created by the fragmented regulatory framework of chemicals and waste management, and include degradations to the planetary environment, socioeconomic discrepancies, as well as bureaucratical inefficiencies. In this paper, we conduct an empirical analysis to explore the conditions under which the BRS model has emerged, whether it has been able to achieve its objectives, and whether these objectives have minimized negative spillovers. We combine text analysis (e.g., of TripleCOP decisions) with semi-structured interviews with government officials, the BRS secretariat, and relevant NGOs to identify and compare the independent variables determining the problem-shifting prevention capabilities of the TripleCOPs and the BRS secretariat. Based on our findings, we reflect on potential paths for improvement, as well as on the transferability (or lack thereof) of this governance model to other international environmental issues.

The challenge of global environmental governance lies largely in implementing effective solutions to environmental problems as articulated in multilateral environmental agreements. These agreements are narrowly focusing on their own problems and the implementation of measures can create new problems which may impact different people, places, and time, a phenomenon we refer to as problem-shifting. The nature of problem-shifting originating from multilateral environmental agreements has not been examined in a systematic manner. In this study, we make a first step by focusing on the Minamata Convention, which is tasked with the management of anthropogenic mercury emissions. To allow for a comprehensive assessment of the occurrence of problem-shifting the measures taken by countries to implement the Convention, we used national reports to extract nearly 1500 implementation measures, which we categorized into over 100 distinct types, based on the source of mercury, and type of measure implemented. These types are then thoroughly examined against environmental literature to determine the nature of new problems that these measure types create. For instance, the identified measure regarding the prohibition of using dental amalgam displaces the problem due to the increased occurrence of restorative actions needed. Our analysis has identified a number of measures that cause problem-shifting, generating problems in issue streams related to temporal shifts in mercury management, and product management. This assessment on problem-shifts largely outlines various types of problem-shifts occurring, the drivers and burden-holders of the shifts, and potential magnitudes of shifts. We also identify the risk of problem-shifting into the social domain. These results undermine the need for preventative and responsive measures to be established within multilateral environmental agreements, to avoid and mitigate the occurrence of such shifts. The methodology provided in this research may also be applied to the assessment of other agreements.

Recent research on the manifold barriers to evidence use in policy and practice has shown the difficulty of acting on the widespread call for increased evidence use to better address sustainability challenges. Considering these barriers, our inter- and transdisciplinary paper asks what principles and best practices could enhance evidence use for sustainability using the illustrative case of agricultural pesticides. It expands recent scholarly contributions on principles for legitimate science-policy-society interfaces for food systems and comparable sustainability challenges.

We develop a normative model with principles and best practices for the five stages of evidence use: evidence production, evidence uptake, the influence of evidence on decisions, sustainability effects of evidence-informed decisions, and feedbacks into new evidence production. Our starting point are the ideals of deliberative democracy and biosphere stewardship in socio-ecological systems. Deliberative democracy refers to policymaking based on reasoned argumentation. Biosphere stewardship advocates responsible management practices that support biosphere-based sustainable development by reflexively drawing on diverse kinds of knowledge and evidence. Based on these guiding concepts, we synthesize a set of core principles of good evidence use from the existing literature on evidence-based and -informed policymaking and practice.

We then apply the core principles of good evidence use to the case of agricultural pesticides. Reducing the environmental and human health risks of pesticide use is a complex sustainability challenge at the food-health-environment nexus. We operationalize the synthesized core principles to derive a set of best practices of evidence use in pesticide policy and practice. We empirically illustrate these best practices using examples from interdisciplinary research and from the experiences of practitioners engaged in the transformation of pesticide governance and use in Switzerland. We argue that such best practices can serve as bright spots to inform future change towards more evidence-informed decision-making for sustainability.

We conclude by providing recommendations on how the identified best practices can be strengthened in the case of pesticides and in relation to other sustainability challenges. Our conclusions speak to scholarship on evidence use and its governance, science-society interfaces, deliberative environmental decision-making, and biosphere stewardship. They can also guide actions of policymakers and practitioners for increasing evidence use in the governance of pesticides, food systems, and other sustainability challenges.

The role and influence of international scientific advisory committees to environmental treaties is understudied. International relations scholars mostly focused on stand-alone global scientific committees which are the Intergovernmental panel on climate change (IPCC) and the Intergovernmental science-policy platform on biodiversity and ecological systems (IPBES). This paper provides a new typology of the science-policy relationship in environmental treaties, by investigating how treaty makers and scientific committee members design the knowledge production process to support treaty decision-making. Mobilizing literature from the field of science and technology studies (STS), it focuses on two design dimensions of the scientific committees: the diversity of the membership and the interactive or linear process of knowledge production. These dimensions characterize the presence of boundary work between science and policy. These dimensions permit comparing 20 cases of scientific committees’ organizational structures from a new perspective coming from the STS field. Based on a document analysis of the committee’s terms of reference and procedures and a survey of scientific committee members about their operations, this paper finds that these two dimensions vary widely among different treaties. In line with STS literature conclusions, this variation may lead to varying uptake levels of scientific knowledge in different international environmental organizations. The typology is a new data-driven tool that will allow cross-case comparisons and which can be used both as the dependent or independent variable in future studies.