The grammar of monitoring and enforcement mechanisms in international conservation: A comparative institutional analysis of four treaty regimes

Of enduring interest to social scientists is better understanding institutional design. Formal institutions (e.g., treaties and regulations) convey salient governance information, including actors' required, allowed, or prohibited actions, and monitoring and enforcement mechanisms to foster institutional compliance with those actions. Yet, few studies have compared these features in international instruments. Addressing this gap, this study utilizes the Institutional Analysis and Development (IAD) framework's rule typology and the Institutional Grammar (IG) to compare the stringency and robustness of the formal monitoring and enforcement mechanisms outlined in four conservation treaties: The International Convention on the Regulation of Whaling; the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species, the Convention on Migratory Species, and the Convention on Biological Diversity. Doing so revealed the mechanisms' theoretical ability to manage species' appropriation levels and treaty opt-outs (e.g. reservations/objections), thwart biodiversity losses, and meet their conservation objectives. Findings include (1) identification of verbs and semantic constraints that dilute legally mandated actions to recommended outcomes; (2) a divide among treaty regimes by specificity of the required/permitted/recommended actions assigned to actors; and (3) enforcement mechanisms that require member states to take punitive action against non-compliant national actors vis-a-vis regimes with minimal to no enforcement requirements. This study complements existing institutional design, international relations, and legal scholarship by illustrating the IG's and IAD's utility to describe the treaties' formal monitoring and enforcement design features. It also provides a better understanding of formal international conservation governance which may be useful to policy designers and conservation practitioners.