On Verifiability, and How it Could Matter for International Environmental Agreements

iii Preface Hundreds or even thousands of international legal instruments on "the environment" are in existence. What happens to international environmental agreements once they are signed, and how does the process of implementing such agreements influence their effectiveness? These are the questions that motivate the IIASA project "Implementation and Effectiveness of International Environmental Commitments (IEC)". Research teams are examining these questions from many angles and with different methods. One factor that influences whether some agreements are effective is the extent to which they may include provisions for verification of compliance. Although this has been a central issue in the analysis of arms control agreements, until recently verification of international environmental agreements has been relatively neglected. Yet many environmental agreements would probably be more effective if they included better provisions for determining whether a party is in compliance and for managing problems of inadequate performance and noncompliance. In this paper, Owen Greene analyzes the factors that determine whether an environmental agreement is "verifiable". He decomposes the general concept of verifiability into its constituent properties; notably, he explores the intrinsic verifiability of different substances and behaviors. He suggests that proxies can be used in international agreements to improve the verifiability of the agreement by simplifying what must be verified and by tuning the terms of the agreement to indicators that are more easily measured and verified. Greene also examines the ways that "verifiability" could affect the formation of international agreements as well as their implementation. Further, he shows how the verifiability of an agreement can change over time-either by design or due to changes, e.g., in technology or the cost of gathering and analyzing information. Throughout, he shows the many pathways by which verifiability might influence the effectiveness of an agreement. This paper is part of IEC's work on international verification and review mechanisms. IEC is now sponsoring several case-studies related to these topics. v The context of this paper in the IEC project This paper is one of several IEC working papers that survey the existing literature, place the project in a framework of prior research, and identify the major questions that deserve further study. At the outset, members of the project decided to prepare these papers to ensure that we were adequately aware of other research in the field and, especially, to ensure that we would be studying the most important questions in the proper context. The papers that play …