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International Linkages and Environmental Sustainability: The Effectiveness of the Regime Network

While the literature on environmental regime effectiveness has focused on particular regimes considered in isolation, the overall effects of the system of regimes are more relevant. First, regimes are connected because they often share institutional architecture, deal with different aspects of the same problem, frame issues using similar legal and policy principles, and are subject to attempts to coordinate across issues by groups of nations, NGOs and international agencies. Thus, the network of regimes has social capital that can be applied to particular issues. Second, owing to ecological interconnectedness, regimes can have both positive and negative side-effects on environmental issues that they do not explicitly deal with. Allowing for political interconnectedness using concepts drawn from social network theory and for ecological interconnectedness using broad measures of sustainability, this article argues that nations more central to the network of environmental regimes should score higher on measures of sustainability. This is because the social capital in the regime network can more easily be brought to bear on centrally placed nations to make them cooperate and because they are more likely to be aware of negative regime side-effects. Measures of network centrality do, indeed, positively impact on nations’ performance on four sustainability indicators. The analysis also finds that a nation's position in the general international system further positively impacts on its sustainability scores. This leads to the suggestion that the environmental regime network is supported by social capital in more general international networks.