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Environmental regime effectiveness and the North American Great Lakes Water Quality Agreement

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Abstract

Scholars and practitioners around the globe are grappling with how to improve the effectiveness of complex, transboundary, and multilevel environmental regimes. International environmental agreements (IEAs) have been around for decades yet achievements and outcomes have not met expectations. While international relations scholars have primarily focused on the effectiveness of agreements between states, public policy scholars have been interested in outcomes at a variety of scales including international, national, sub-national, and local across various environmental policy domains and at the instrument and program levels. This article presents findings from a case study of environmental regime effectiveness that uses a modified version of the Oslo-Postdam solution to assess the effectiveness of the Great Lakes Water Quality Agreement, a long-standing, bilateral international environmental agreement between Canada and the USA. The findings indicate that there is a need to more broadly define international environmental agreements in complex transboundary systems to include both formal and informal regime features and multilevel governance efforts and to focus on specific policy goals and ecological outcomes associated with IEAs. This case also illustrates the potential to modify the Oslo-Postdam approach by combining expert assessment and data collection methods with traditional policy analysis and program evaluation methods in assessments of environmental regime effectiveness.

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Notes

  1. Response scale for actual performance: not achieved at all (0); very little achieved (1); some achievement (2); partially achieved (3); mostly achieved (4) and fully achieved (5).

  2. For detailed qualitative comments from open-ended survey questions, see Johns et al. (2015).

  3. Response scale for NR and CO using a 7-point scale from: no contribution (0); low contribution (0.15); low–medium contribution (.35); medium contribution (.50); medium–high contribution (.65); high contribution (.85), and complete contribution (1.0).

  4. In the case of GO(ii), the standard deviation is .859, meaning that 85.9% of responses fall within the range of plus or minus one standard deviation around the mean of 2.64. There was a high degree of agreement among respondents that this objective has been some or partially achieved.

  5. We adapted this scale to 0–5 and then re-weighted to get value out of 10 (with 0 indicating no level of accomplishment to 10 being complete accomplishment) in order to apply the Oslo-Potsdam formula.

  6. We used a quantitative question (Survey Question 2) that included a list of eight programs and measures and use the mean of responses to all those questions divided by number of possible responses (7) to arrive at value from 0 to 1.

  7. The standard deviation is .848, meaning that 84.8% of responses fall within the range of plus or minus one standard deviation around the mean of 1.93 (within 1 response below .939 very little achieved) or 1 response above the mean at 2.93 (partially achieved).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Politics and Public Administration, Ryerson University, Toronto, ON, Canada

    Carolyn Johns & Adam Thorn

  2. Department of Political Science, Wilfrid Laurier University, Waterloo, ON, Canada

    Debora VanNijnatten

Authors
  1. Carolyn Johns
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  2. Adam Thorn
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  3. Debora VanNijnatten
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Correspondence to Carolyn Johns.

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Johns, C., Thorn, A. & VanNijnatten, D. Environmental regime effectiveness and the North American Great Lakes Water Quality Agreement. Int Environ Agreements 18, 315–333 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10784-018-9385-1

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