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Understanding Institutional Change in International Environmental Regimes

Histories of regime theory often characterize research during the 1980s as being focused on whether regimes matter and, during the 1990s, as being focused more on how they matter and what makes them (in)effective. Today, constructivist theorists of organizational power and principal-agent theorists concerned with the difaculties that agent strategies can create in contracting, though they may agree on little else, are in complete agreement that institutions, once established, are unlikely to persist forever in their initial state. For scholars of international environmental regimes, the need to understand institutional change has taken on even greater urgency, given the rapidly growing web of legal commitments and institutions that have been created in recent decades. While few would lament the global environment’s rise to prominence on the international agenda, it is far from clear what consequences growing institutional proliferation will have for the future of environmental governance. There is good reason for the discipline’s current concern with institutional change. Few scholars are as well placed as Oran Young to comment on these developments. In Institutional Dynamics Young makes the case that we should view environmental and resource regimes through the prisms of complexity and systems theory. Such approaches need not be relegated to the study of naturalphysical systems; Young argues that they are equally valuable for understanding social systems. Accordingly, Young proposes to study institutional change in terms of the various stresses (both internal and external) that confront environ-