This article draws on the findings of the international research project on the Institutional Dimensions of Global Environmental Change to evaluate current proposals for reforming organizational arrangements that address environmental protection and especially calls for strengthening the UN Environment Programme or creating a UN Environment Organization. The first section explores pitfalls arising when policy-makers focus on form before sorting out functional matters. The next section examines institutional challenges confronting efforts to create effective environmental governance systems. The final section broadens the scope to address issues extending beyond environmental protection in a world of nation states. The goal is not to throw cold water on specific proposals of those who advocate organizational reform. Rather, the article argues that form should follow function in this realm as in others. By itself, organizational reform cannot achieve environmental protection, much less the broader goal of sustainable development.

This article presents the International Regimes Database (IRD), an analytical tool designed to (i) move regime analysis from its current emphasis on the use of discrete case studies to the use of a relational database encompassing comparable data on a large number of cases and (ii) facilitate quantitative as well as qualitative analyses of hypotheses dealing with international regimes. The article describes the architecture of this database, introduces some preliminary findings relating to compliance, decision rules, and programmatic activities, and discusses methodological issues pertaining to the use of the database on the part of other scholars. It provides a short and easily accessible introduction to the book-length treatment of the IRD contained in: Helmut Breitmeier, Oran R. Young, and Michael Zürn, Analyzing International Environmental Regimes , Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006.

The Oslo-Potsdam approach to regime effectiveness has much to recommend it, especially in conceptual terms. It yields effectiveness scores for individual regimes that range from 0 to 1 and that facilitate comparative analysis. Yet the revised version of the approach set forth in Hovi et al. (2003, this volume) fails to solve the fundamental problems evident in earlier versions regarding the no-regime outcome (NR) and the collective optimum (CO). Nor does this version address the relative merits of the Oslo-Potsdam solution and other approaches to regime consequences that do not rely on direct measurements of regime effectiveness as the dependent variable. As a result, the argument that some measure of effectiveness—however faulty—is better than none is not persuasive. Even so, the debate over the Oslo-Potsdam solution has proven fruitful. Our understanding of the issues involved in evaluating regime consequences has surely grown as a product of this debate.

Institutionalists commonly assume that the operation of regimes accounts for much of what happens in international society. Realists and neorealists, by contrast, typically regard institutions as epiphenomena that reflect deeper forces in international society and that can be expected to change when the deeper forces change. As is so often the case in debates of this nature, the truth no doubt lies somewhere between these polar perspectives. To identify the signal of the effects of institutions and especially to track variations in the strength of this signal, we need to find ways to draw clearcut inferences about the causal links between institutions and collective outcomes at the international level. Ideally, we should also devise an integrated index of regime effectiveness that would allow us to compare and contrast different regimes or the same regimes over time in terms of their effectiveness. This article offers a critical review of the leading efforts to develop useful inferences and indices with particular reference to international environmental regimes. It concludes that our efforts in this realm to date have yielded only modest—though hardly trivial—results. Yet we are far from exhausting the available analytic resources in this field, and there is much that can be done to improve inferences and indices in this important area of research in the future.