Designing Effective Environmental Regimes: The Conditional Keys

re international regimes that have been established to solve en vironmental problems designed and operating as effectively as JL \>. possible? Although the call for research addressing the design question has been increasing in intensity,1 and a number of insightful case studies and compilations have been published,2 few systematic, comparative projects have been carried out so far.3 My book Designing Effective Environmental Regimes: The Key Conditions is an attempt to move in the direction of systematic, comparative research on the impact of varying regime design.4 In this article, I briefly introduce my ap proach, provide a brief overview of main characteristics of the regimes and their effectiveness, present some main findings, and conclude with suggestions for effective regime design. International regimes are in line with Marc Levy, Oran Young, and Michael Z?rn, to be understood as social institutions consisting of agreed-upon principles, norms, rules, procedures and programmes that govern the interactions of actors in specific issue-areas. By focusing on the issue of institutional design, the ambition is clearly to move beyond the much-debated do regimes matter question5 and discuss more specifically to what extent and how regimes possibly matter. In other words, are we able to say anything more specific about the types of regimes?and their specific regime features?that are likely to make more impact and contribute to higher effectiveness than others? In a re cent gathering of regime scholars, a tentative list of around twenty in stitutional issues and factors was produced.6 For purposes such as mine, the research agenda needed to be narrowed down. However, finding objective criteria for selecting factors for further study is difficult.7 Six more specific factors were selected for further study in my book: access and participation procedures, deci sionmaking rules, the role of the secretariat, structuring of the agenda, organization of the science-politics interface, and verification and com pliance mechanisms. These factors certainly touch on controversial is sues in international environmental politics and actual dilemmas for