Structural Group Leadership and Regime Effectiveness

Abstract

Usually the provision of international environmental public goods cannot be secured by a single state. Rather, a group of major powers has to pool its resources to provide structural leadership in order to achieve an effective regime. Such a group of pushers uses its structural power to achieve its goal. However, it faces two challenges. First, it may have to overcome the opposition of a group of laggards that desires less environmental protection and may try to counter the pushers' efforts. We hypothesise that the regime will be more effective to the extent to which the pushers predominate over the laggards in terms of structural power. Second, both groups may have to overcome a collective action problem with regard to dispensing costly side‐payments. We argue that social capital embedded in inter‐state networks may help the groups to overcome such collective action problems. Thus we argue that the regime will be more effective to the extent to which pushers are predominant and also have more social capital than laggards. Empirical results support our hypotheses.

Latent influence networks in global environmental politics

“…As such, some states may be able to benefit from better environmental quality or economic advantages without incurring some or all of the costs stemming from treaty ratification. While we may not observe free-riding in its truest sense, we observe a form of “negative influence” wherein the action of some countries makes others less likely to act [5, 6]. In other words, negative influence occurs when one state ratifying a particular treaty means that another state is less likely to do the same with that particular agreement.…”

“…To compel action for environmental protection, states may exercise influence to promote treaty ratification. Power and influence are tools that actors may use to overcome a collective action problem [5, 6, 32]. This is a form of power that is conventionally considered by sociologists and political scientists, wherein some actor uses their power to influence another actor to do something they would not otherwise do [8, 33–35].…”

“…While initial efforts to address this issue internationally failed, due to pressures from the US and the Eastern bloc during the Cold War, it was primarily the influence of the Nordic states and Germany that eventually led to the establishment of the Convention on Long-Range Transboundary Air Pollution in 1979 and other states joining this agreement [1, 2]. This illustration underlines that actor linkages [3, 4] and structural group leadership [5] are frequently seen as key determinants in international environmental governance. And, indeed, more recently have EU states been aspiring to leadership roles in global environmental policymaking and to influence others to join their efforts.…”

“…International influence—the pressure exerted by one state to get another to do something it would not otherwise do—has often been touted as a means by which to compel coordinated action [5, 6]. Consider the canonical collective action problem and its relevance to the subject of environmental protection—preservation of the environment requires that states cooperate and commit to behavioral changes to provide the public good of environmental quality.…”

“…Within this dynamic, we might expect one state’s action to either promote the action of another or promote the inaction of another as incentives for inaction mount, allowing such a state to, e.g., benefit from economic gains due to laxer environmental standards. However, the fact remains that we “know relatively little about the conditions under which such attempts are likely to succeed,” [5]. Indeed, state influence is a foundational concept for scholars and practitioners of international politics [7, 8], and while there have been attempts to develop systematic measurements of influence [9, 10], such approaches suffer from interpretation and inferential challenges [11].…”