The Question: ‘How can international environmental agreements be enforced?’
If you have followed the climate change debates in the last years, it's pretty evident that this is THE QUESTION. Invariably carbon trading and off-setting have become more popular than carbon taxes, maybe because there's more faith in the market-based approach than in the good old regulator. Business people also dislike "taxes", they are much better in trading.
The question is however about enforcement or how we administer, implement and eventually coerce compliance. NGOs could act as watchdogs, private sector could strengthen certification schemes or the WTO may be somehow involved in a trade and environment synergy (assuming environment and development can ever be reconciled?)
But then - what environmental agreements? The two decades following the UNCED in Rio saw an unprecedented proliferation in MEAs, some more successful than others, yet a great many of them. It seems that the most important and crucial ones were hard to be agreed in the first place.
So what do the economists think? Is there something more original than the cap and trade and REDD?
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