The New Focus: Compliance

The traditional model pays little attention to compliance with international legal instruments. States assume that other states will have the capacity to comply with treaty obligations and do not consider that a treaty’s primary purpose may be to build the local capacity of member states to comply or to encourage nongovernmental participation in discharging international obligations. In
this approach compliance can be measured in a snapshot. Compliance is regarded hierarchically: governments join treaties and adopt national implementing legislation or regulations, with which domestic units comply.

In the new model, agreements evolve over time and, most importantly, compliance by countries changes over time. States do not necessarily comply widely with their obligations. This suggests redirecting our attention from mainly negotiating new agreements, a politically attractive strategy, to building compliance with them, for which there may be little political gain. Focussing on compliance requires, among other things, that we acknowledge the link between national and international law, the importance of non-state actors, the need for adequate administrative capacity in governments, and the central role of monitoring and information flows.

It is useful to distinguish between implementation, compliance, and effectiveness. Parties implement international agreements when they take measures to make them effective in their domestic law. They comply with them when they adhere to implementing measures and when the targeted actors change their behavior. International agreements contain a variety of specific obligations, some procedural, such as reporting requirements, others substantive, such as phasing out certain chemicals by a targeted date. Effectiveness differs from compliance in that even if a country complies with a treaty, the agreement may be ineffective in achieving its stated purposes.

Compliance involves a dynamic process between governments, secretariats, international organizations, nongovernmental organizations, subnational units, and actors whose behavior is targeted by the agreement. Compliance changes over time, both within countries and among countries party to the agreement. The results from an international study of five environmental and natural resource agreements in nine countries suggest that, in general, there is a secular trend toward improved implementation and compliance. There appear to be many reasons for this, but one of the most important is international momentum, which means the collective force
of states, secretariats, nongovernmental organizations and individuals as it is brought to bear upon the behavior of a state party to the agreement.