The Rise of Soft Law: Have International Environmental Agreements Suffered?

The increasing use of soft law rather than hard law has had a negative impact on international environmental agreements created to address climate change, as evidenced by severely weakened implementation and enforcement mechanisms in many of these modern documents. First, the author will provide an analysis of the existing literature and explain where her contribution fits within the current scholarship, as well as why this research is necessary. This is followed by an assessment of the Paris Agreement of 2015, Montreal Protocol, Kyoto Protocol, and the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. The author will demonstrate how hard law would have made soft law agreements much more effective. Lastly, she will share her main conclusions and hopes for future research on this topic.