Abstract
This article tests theories, elaborated by rationalists, constructivists, and network theorists, that explain the ratification of international environmental treaties. Rationalists argue that countries’ material self-interest and political and economic conditions affect the likelihood of countries ratifying treaties. Constructivists argue that countries are influenced by exposure to world society. Structural embeddedness theory argues that countries are influenced by neighboring countries, religion, language, and economic peers, and those whom they have network ties to via diplomatic relations and IGO memberships. The article is a study of how these factors affected the ratification of two environmental treaties: United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change and the Kyoto Protocol. The results show that political and economic factors, peer behavior, and network ties were more important in explaining the ratification of the Kyoto Protocol than the UNFCCC. Similar to von Stein (J Conflict Resolut 52:243–268, 2008), it found that exposure to world society was important in the UNFCCC. The authors suggested that the differences were due to the demands which the Kyoto Protocol placed on countries in contrast to the “softness” of the UNFCCC. They also discussed how social influence—based on a variety of inter-governmental relations and affiliations—may signal a change in the structure of the global environmental regime and how it conducts its business.
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Notes
We would like to thank Gary Goertz for this insight.
The list of countries is available upon request.
The dummy variables years are not presented to save space.
When comparing the goodness of fit statistics, be cautious because our N changes across analyses. This is because we had missing data for social influence based on diplomatic ties.
The Kyoto Protocol could only be ratified by countries which had already ratified the UNFCCC.
In1998 Maldives, Fiji, and El Salvador ratified KP. In 1999 Bahamas, Bolivia, Georgia, Guatemala, Jamaica, Mongolia, Nicaragua, Panama, Paraguay, Trinidad and Tobago, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan ratified KP.
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Acknowledgments
We acknowledge the Climate Research Program at the National Institute for Environmental Studies in Tsukuba, Japan for providing funding for this research, the International Studies Program at the University of Arizona for travel funds, and the Fulbright Program which enabled the third author to teach and do research at the University of Tsukuba in 2007. Finally, thanks to Gary Goertz, Noah Friedkin, Eugene Johnsen, Scott Eliason, Robert Pekkanen, Scott Savage, Daisuke Murakami, Hajime Seya, and several graduate students in the Sociology Department at Arizona for their help with this paper.
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Yamagata, Y., Yang, J. & Galaskiewicz, J. A contingency theory of policy innovation: how different theories explain the ratification of the UNFCCC and Kyoto Protocol. Int Environ Agreements 13, 251–270 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10784-012-9185-y
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10784-012-9185-y