Compliance in International Relations. Key to Effective Controlling of Pollution by Environmental Regimes? (PDF)

Seminar paper from the year 2015 in the subject Politics - Environmental Policy, grade: 2,0, University of Bamberg, language: English, abstract: This paper will describe the importance of compliance in the ever-more complex international relations, discuss the effectiveness of sub-regimes and their importance to enforce the control of common goods, such as pollution of the seas.

Analyzing international relations with the focus on compliance of actors with regimes or sub-regimes to control a common good is becoming more and more interesting, not only because over a very short period of time (compared to world history) all resources on this planet are becoming more and more rare, but also because every political actor in this anarchic world system can use, pollute, destroy, save or ignore it, with basically no real control mechanism.

The paper is going to use two well know theories to analyze compliance and effectiveness of international regimes or regulations. The institutional approach will be used to discuss whether it is more likely for actors to comply or not and under which circumstances the level of compliance is high enough to turn an international regime into a useful and effective instrument to regulate and control a certain behavior. The theory of realism will be used to analyze the likelihood of compliance and effectiveness of international regimes from a realist's point of view.
The two theories will be compared regarding the most coherent explanation of likelihood of compliance and its influence on the effectiveness of the sub-regimes OILPOL and MARPOL, which were created to control oil pollution of the seas. Which theory can best explain the effectiveness and the likelihood of compliance with these two sub-regimes?
Afterwards, compliance of actors with sub-regimes in the scope of the control and protection of common goods will give a detailed view on the problem of pollution of the seas, followed by a brief conclusion.