Overview

International environmental regimes--institutional arrangements that govern human-environmental interactions--are dynamic, changing continuously over time. Some regimes go from strength to strength, becoming more effective over the years, while others seem stymied from the beginning. Some regimes start strong, then decline; others are ineffective at first but become successful with the passage of time. In Institutional Dynamics, Oran Young offers the first detailed analysis of these developmental trajectories. Understanding the emergent patterns in environmental governance and how they affect regime effectiveness, he argues, is an important part of solving environmental problems. Young proposes a framework for analyzing patterns of institutional change based on the alignment of internal, endogenous factors--which include flexibility, monitoring procedures, and funding mechanisms--with such external, exogenous factors as the attributes of environmental problems, the political and economic contexts, and technological innovations. He offers five case studies of environmental regimes, governing environmental problems ranging from climate change to the protection of the northern fur seal, each of which exemplifies one of the emergent patterns he has identified: progressive development, punctuated equilibrium, arrested development, diversion, and collapse.

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Young's book is a creative theory-building effort as well as a fresh reinterpretation of five well-known case studies in the history of international environmental law. With Young's guiding hand and prolific scholarship, the study of international environmental regimes has evolved from early questions such as whether these institutions matter at all and how they form to today's research frontier, which is the search for theories that explain dynamic patterns and evolution.

Author Information

Oran R. Young is Professor and Codirector of the Program on Governance for Sustainable Development at the Bren School of Environmental Science and Management, University of California, Santa Barbara, and Chair of the Scientific Committee of the International Human Dimensions Programme on Global Environmental Change, sponsored by the International Council Of Science (ICSU), the International Social Science Council (ISSC), and the United Nations University (UNU). He is the author of The Institutional Dimensions of Environmental Change: Fit, Interplay, and Scale (2002) and coeditor (with Leslie A. King and Heike Schroeder) of Institutions and Environmental Change: Principal Findings, Applications, and Research Frontiers (2008), both published by the MIT Press.

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