The survival of the weakest: the echo of the Rio Summit principles in environmental treaties

ABSTRACT

This article examines the influence of the 1992 United Nations Conference on Environment and Development, known as the Rio Summit, on the design of subsequent international environmental agreements (IEAs). In particular, it investigates the extent to which the principles outlined in the Rio Declaration were integrated into IEAs concluded in the following years. We focus our investigation on three principles: the precautionary principle, common but differentiated responsibilities, and the polluter pays principle. Analyzing a collection of 2,211 IEAs and their 509 amendments, we find that the Rio Summit catalyzed the dissemination of these principles. However, our study also reveals that the Rio Conference was an inflection point, wherein weaker expressions of these principles became more prevalent. Stronger expressions, which were included in some IEAs prior to the Rio Summit, became relatively less common thereafter. We call this evolutionary process the ‘survival of the weakest’.

KEYWORDS:

• Rio Summit
• precautionary principle
• common but differentiated responsibilities
• polluter pays
• international environmental agreements
• institutional design

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Data availability statement

The data that support the findings of this study will be made openly available at https://iea.uoregon.edu/codings-IEA-design-features with the publication of this article.

Supplementary material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed online at https://doi.org/10.1080/09644016.2023.2236505

Notes

1. For an overview of the Rio Summit, its historical context, and its primary outputs, see (Chasek and Wagner 2012), pp.1–16.

2. This paper is limited to the study of the diffusion of principles in IEAs. It does not explore their operationalization nor their implementation.

3. Future research could look at the fate of other principles, such sovereignty over natural resources, gender equality, or liability in case of environmental damage.

4. Our dataset does not include IEAs concluded since 2016. This limitation is justified for three reasons: 1) the reliability of the IEADB dataset is reduced for recent years; 2) the number of missing IEAs is expected to be limited since the average number of IEAs per year has significantly dropped over the last two decades; 3) This paper is interested in long-term trends, not circumstantial variations.

5. We double-checked the selected provisions to weed out false positives and a different coder coded 10% of our collection of instruments a second time in order to assess the frequency of false negatives. The Kappa value of this double coding is 0,83, which is considered as an ‘almost perfect’ intercoder reliability (Landis and Koch 1977).

6. The decline of the relative frequency of principles in IEAs since 2008 is related to the changing proportion of protocols and amendments over base agreements. Base agreements represented 66% of the instruments in the 1990s and only 51% in the 2010s, whereas amendments represented 17% of instruments in the 1990s and 30% in the 2010s. Principles are more likely to be found in base agreements than in protocols and amendments, as repeating the principles is often unnecessary. Therefore, it is unsurprising that the frequency of principles relative to the total number of instruments (including treaties, protocols, and amendments) has declined.

7. Other studies have evoked theories of biological evolution to understand international institutions. See (Florini 1996) and (Gilady and Hoffmann 2013).

8. Earlier IEAs rest on a ‘precautionary logic’, such as the 1952 International Convention for the High Seas Fisheries of the North Pacific Ocean, but they do not articulate it as a principle. The 1987 Brundtland report refers to ‘precautionary measures’ in its annex on proposed legal principles but it does not refer to uncertainty and appears similar to the prevention principle.

9. De Sadeleer estimates that, ‘since the 1992 Rio Conference, the [precautionary principle] has been taken up in the majority of bilateral and multilateral environmental agreements’ (2020: 138). Our own account differs significantly. If we consider only IEAs concluded since 1992, we find the precautionary principle in 8.3% of IEAs.

10. There is also a transatlantic discussion as to whether the principle 15 of the Rio Declaration refers to a principle of general application or to an approach among others. The official translation of the Rio Declaration is inconsistent in this regard.

11. Although Principle 10 does call for a liability regime, it does not specify compensation for victims of pollution.

12. There is a total of 59 instruments in this sample. However, 5 instruments were excluded. In one case, it was due to a coding error. The other 4 instruments were excluded because there was not a searchable or full text expression of the treaty available. In the results presented here, if a treaty contained more than one expression of the principle it is counted in the strongest category only.

13. The literatures on historical institutionalism (Fioretos 2017) and institutional isomorphism (DiMaggio and Powell 1983) seem particularly promising to hypothesize on these causal mechanisms.