Takeaways for Policymakers on Making Treaties More Effective.
Authors: Mathieu JP Poirier PhD MPH CPH and Steven J Hoffman JD PhD LLD
The first systematic review and meta-analysis of international treaties’ impacts, challenges conventional wisdom on the gold standard for countries to make commitments to each other and identifies pathways to make treaties more effective.
Key Points
- This systematic field-wide evidence synthesis found that international treaties have mostly failed to produce their intended results.
- International treaties in the trade and finance policy area were the exception, exhibiting consistent evidence of positive results.
- Use of enforcement mechanisms could lead to more effective environmental, human rights, humanitarian, maritime and security treaties.
- This study is immediately relevant for policymakers involved in the drafting or negotiation of international treaties.
Introduction
International treaties are often used by countries to address concerns that cross national boundaries, including the environment, human rights, humanitarian crises, maritime issues, security and trade. While over 250,000 international treaties exist, no study has ever compiled and analyzed decades of research assessing their effectiveness. Our recently published research in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) used innovative global legal epidemiological methods to assess whether treaties are helpful in addressing global challenges and which factors contribute to more effective treaties. This document outlines the study findings for policymakers.
Assessing International Treaties for Effectiveness
While leaders from government, academia, business and civil society routinely call for new treaties to address global challenges, little evidence exists evaluating if these instruments are serving their intended purpose. With little research available, especially on the impact of different treaty designs across policy domains, policymakers are left with personal experience, case studies and intuition to design and negotiate new international laws.
Despite this lack of evidence, considerable resources are invested when drafting, signing, ratifying and enforcing international treaties. Moreover, the indirect opportunity costs associated with negotiating and implementing treaties may draw attention away from potentially more important initiatives. An assessment of international treaties, including how they could be more effective, is warranted and necessary.
Designing More Effective Treaties
Our research evaluated which treaties have effects, what those effects are, and how future treaties could be designed for greater effectiveness. To develop the findings, we conducted a systematic field-wide evidence syntheses to evaluate the effects of international treaties, which included a rigorous systematic review of all existing quantitative impact evaluations of treaties based on a published protocol. Applying a relatively new scientific approach, known as Global Legal Epidemiology, provides a novel perspective on the centuries old field of international law.
The study measured the effects of treaties in six policy domains, environment, human rights, humanitarian crises, maritime issues, security and trade and finance. The study found that only trade and finance treaties were associated with measurable progress in achieving the intended objectives of the treaties.
In contrast, the impacts of treaties governing the environment, human rights, humanitarian crises, maritime issues and security were not found to produce measurable effects. Numerous treaties governing these policy domains have either not worked or have been insufficiently studied with rigorous methods to demonstrate positive impacts. Even among studies evaluating social and civil liberties outcomes, the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade was associated with two of the largest intended impacts, i.e., reducing rates of child labour and easing migration to new member countries.
Not only did many treaties have no measurable impact, but some treaties may have even led to unintended harmful impacts. For instance, the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child was found to be the treaty associated with the most harmful effects, including worsened human rights practices, no improvements in health outcomes and, paradoxically, increases in child labour. These counterintuitive impacts could stem from repressive governments seeking diplomatic rewards for signing human rights treaties while facing few consequences for failures to comply with treaty provisions.
To further determine which factors could contribute to more effective treaties we looked at four treaty design mechanisms (see figure 1). For treaties governing environmental, human rights, humanitarian, maritime, and security policy domains, the only modifiable treaty design choice with the potential to improve effectiveness was the inclusion of enforcement mechanisms such as prescribing financial sanctions on countries or expelling countries from treaty bodies. In contrast, the study found that complaint, oversight, and transparency mechanisms were not associated with greater treaty effectiveness.
This study also found treaties negotiated through economic cooperation organizations like the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development or World Trade Organization produced measurable effects, while those negotiated through UN agencies and human rights organizations did not. The size of a treaty’s negotiating forum appears to influence outcomes, with a suggestive dose-response relationship between increasing forum size and reduced impacts. This relationship might stem from a gradual weakening of treaty provisions during consensus-based negotiations when more countries are involved and divergent positions need to be accommodated.
Finally, studies found larger impacts when evaluating treaties immediately at the time of their signing rather than at later stages of ratification and coming into legal force. This could suggest that immediate socialization and short-term normative processes stemming from treaties’ negotiation may be even more important than the longer-term legal processes. This would imply that the treaty negotiation and signing process itself may be an opportunity for governments to maximize international treaty impacts.
Recommendations
While the 224 studies analyzed in this evidence synthesis constitute a substantial body of scientific literature on the impact of international treaties, the quality and breadth of this evidence must improve. More funding is needed to support research on disentangling the contexts and circumstances in which treaty design mechanisms can be effectively deployed to achieve treaties’ intended impacts.
Calls for new international treaties to address global challenges beyond trade and finance should be received with caution. If pursued, enforcement mechanisms appear to be the only treaty design choice that holds promise of maximizing the chances of achieving intended effects. Future treaties beyond trade and finance that do not have enforcement mechanisms are unlikely to be worth their considerable effort and may cause unintended harm. These findings are immediately relevant for treaties that are currently being negotiated or that are being considered for negotiation.
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