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Enforcing 'Self-Enforcing' International Environmental Agreements, David M. Mcevoy, John K. Stranlund

John K. Stranlund

Theoretical analyses of international environmental agreements (IEAs) have typically employed the concept of self-enforcing agreements to predict the number of parties to such an agreement. The term self-enforcing, however, is a bit misleading. The concept refers to the stability of cooperative agreements, not to enforcing these agreements once they are in place. Most analyses of IEAs simply ignore the issue of enforcing compliance. In this paper we analyze a static IEA game in which parties to an agreement finance an independent enforcement body with the power to monitor the parties’ compliance to the terms of an IEA and impose penalties …