Part Two: The Effectiveness of International Environmental Regimes Problem Structure, Institutional Design, and the Relative Effectiveness of International Environmental Agreements

Assessing the relative effectiveness of international environmental agreements accurately requires careful attention to the structures of the problems they address. Although even studies of single agreements would beneat by evaluating the inouence of problem structure, problem structure poses particularly large analytic challenges for scholars interested in the relative effectiveness of environmental treaties. To determine which aspects of institutional design account for the better performance of some environmental agreements requires methodological choices that address the inouence of problem structure on both design and the behaviors agreements target. Scholars are increasingly undertaking comparative analyses of environmental agreements, regimes, and institutions, to extend and improve our understanding of how much different institutional design elements contribute to an agreement’s effectiveness. The need to account for problem structure when analyzing institutional inouence arises from four factors. First, problem structure is