Pardee Researchers Publish Paper in Global Environmental Politics

Pardee Center’s Prof. Adil Najam, Dr. Miquel Muñoz and Rachel Thrasher published a research paper titled ‘Measuring the Negotiation Burden of Multilateral Environmental Agreements’ in the peer-reviewed journal, Global Environmental Politics (9[4]: 1-13).

The paper focuses on the Global Environmental Governance (GEG) system, which has grown significantly since the 1992 United Nations Conference on Environment and Development in Rio de Janeiro (UNCED). In this paper, the authors analyze ten leading Multilateral Environmental Agreements (MEAs), reviewing various quantitative indicators (related to time, resources and commitment) to chart their evolution and to measure the ‘negotiation burden’ that the burgeoning GEG system is imposing on states and secretariats.

The authors find that these representative MEAs have not only grown in size but also become busier over time, although there are indications that as the GEG system ‘matures,’ it may also be stabilizing. Among other things, the authors find that the reported budget for these ten MEA secretariats has grown nine-fold in sixteen years, from US$ 8.18 million in 1992 to US$ 75.83 million in 2007, budgeting a total of more than US$ 650 million over the sixteen year-period. Counting only the most important of meetings, and using the number of meeting days as an indicator of the ‘negotiation load’, the authors find that the leading MEAs met for a total of 1626 days in the studied period, and that the negotiation load has stabilized, averaging around 115 meeting days per year. Decisions also seem to plateau at about 185 per year.