How to evaluate a global environmental agreement: what works, what doesn’t, and who decides?

Many global environmental treaties include provisions for parties to evaluate their effectiveness. These effectiveness evaluations are, in part, intended to keep parties on track towards meeting collective treaty objectives and provisions, and they rely heavily on scientific and technical information. Understanding how they work provides a key area where social science knowledge can help scientists be more effective at informing governance. While previous literature sought to conceptualize and define treaty effectiveness in specific ways, we develop and apply a new four-step analytical framework for examining how the treaty parties themselves to the seven treaties in the four issue areas of stratospheric ozone depletion, persistent organic pollutants, mercury, and climate change have set up and carried out varying kinds of collective effectiveness evaluations. In our framework, the first step, agreement, looks at of the ways in which treaty objectives and provisions reflect consensus among the negotiating countries on collective objectives and the mechanisms to achieve them. The second step, translation, explores how parties select and use indicators related to treaty objectives and provisions for carrying out effectiveness evaluations. The third step, attribution, focuses on how parties use indicators to engage the causal question of whether treaty implementation has led to desired changes and outcomes. The fourth step, reformulation, details how effectiveness evaluations feed back into alterations to treaty objectives and provisions. In this presentation, based on our comparative and empirically-grounded analysis across the seven treaties in the four issue areas, we present ten specific lessons. Our goal is to develop useful knowledge that can be applied towards improving the ability of international environmental treaty-based cooperation to advance sustainability transitions on a human-dominated planet. The lessons are based on the finding that treaty effectiveness evaluations are best understood as political and dynamic processes that treaty parties, having both shared and individual interests, use as collective learning and accountability mechanisms. shaping science-policy interactions.