International Environmental Negotiation as a Governance Technique
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perts, the Secretariat introduces it to the session of the supreme institu-
tional organ, the Meeting or the Conference of the Contracting Parties,
for its approval. This institutional approval is combined with a specific
mandate to the Secretariat authorizing it to convene a special negotiating
forum, the Conference of Plenipotentiaries, for the official adoption of
the draft amendments. As in the case of constitutive negotiating process,
the Contracting Parties are called upon to adopt and sign the Final Act of
the Conference, including a number of Resolutions and possible Declara-
tions, and, if possible, to sign simultaneously, or at a later date and within
a specified period, the adopted text of the amendments, annexed to the
Final Act. The text of the amendments is subject to a separate acceptance
by each Contracting Party at a later stage, in accordance with the terms
and conditions set up by the relevant Amendment clause contained in the
particular conventional regime. Normally, the acceptance of the amend-
ments internally amounts to a process of ratification. On the other hand,
the entry into force of the amended conventional instrument requires a
prescribed high minimum of acceptances (usually indicated by the “three-
fourths” arithmetical formula) since, in order to produce its relational ef-
fects, requires an extensive critical participation, whereas the entry into
force of an original conventional instrument requires a prescribed low
minimum of ratifications.
An environmental conventional regime may be effectively revised in
terms of protecting and promoting international common interest, if gov-
ernance is prepared and exercised in two interrelated levels:
a. The First Level of Renegotiation as Relational Governance:
Textual and Contextual Aspects of the Revision of
the Conventional Regime
As in the case of the convention-constitutive governance, the first level
of the renegotiation governance of the conventional environmental re-
gime refers to three basic interrelated aspects:
a) the identification of its context;
b) the identification of its form;
c) the identification of its pattern.
