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Gabriela Kütting
ments, or regimes as they call it, as a form of international order. They
use what I call institutional effectiveness as a standard of regime strength
or weakness and thus for them an effective regime must necessarily en-
joy a high level of cooperation as a measure of institutional performance.
The issue of how adequately this cooperation deals with the problem in
question takes a secondary position (i.e. cooperation is the focus of study,
not the capacity of the agreement to deal with the problem giving rise
to it). Only a few authors looking at environmental effectiveness such as
the Norwegian regime theorists (Underdal, 1992; Wettestad & Andresen,
1991, Wettestad, 1995) and some international environmental law spe-
cialists (Susskind, 1993) have considered the environmental problem ne-
cessitating the agreement. However, their concerns are still formulated
within an institutional framework and mostly concerned with the per-
formance of a regime or agreement. This limitation results in environ-
mental degradation being considered from an angle focusing on institu-
tional frameworks
vis-a-vis
environmental degradation rather than on the
eradication or improvement of an environmental problem.
2. The new concept of environmental effectiveness
The main limitation of regime theoretical analysis is its focus on ac-
tor behaviour and on the definition of actors’ interests in the negotiating
situation as the crucial objects of study. The agreement, or regime, is per-
ceived as a closed system that need not be placed in the context in which
it operates. This approach neglects the social environment in which the
regime is formed and of which it is part. Furthermore, there is no discus-
sion of the capacity, or lack of capacity, of the regime to regulate or solve
the environmental problem in question.
So far, effectiveness has largely been defined as a well-working insti-
tution whose performance can achieve change in its members’ behaviour.
This emphasis has led to a prioritising of the analysis of agreement imple-
mentation rather than agreement formation. In turn, this has meant that
effectiveness has come to refer to changes actually achieved by the agree-
ment in question - whether good or bad. In contrast, the prescription of
remedies in the first place has been neglected in analytical terms, which
