期刊名称：Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
印刷版ISSN：0027-8424
电子版ISSN：1091-6490
出版年度：2022
卷号：119
期号：32
DOI：10.1073/pnas.2122854119
语种：English
出版社：The National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America
摘要：Significance
International treaties have mostly failed to produce their intended effects except for international trade and financial laws and treaties with enforcement mechanisms. These results are unexpected because they challenge conventional wisdom about treaties, which are widely considered as the apex mechanism for countries to make commitments to each other. Not only do our findings question the usefulness of the more than 250,000 existing treaties that have been negotiated to date but they should directly inform how national governments and international institutions facilitate global cooperation on the myriad challenges we face and how future international treaties can be better designed for greater impact.
There are over 250,000 international treaties that aim to foster global cooperation. But are treaties actually helpful for addressing global challenges? This systematic field-wide evidence synthesis of 224 primary studies and meta-analysis of the higher-quality 82 studies finds treaties have mostly failed to produce their intended effects. The only exceptions are treaties governing international trade and finance, which consistently produced intended effects. We also found evidence that impactful treaties achieve their effects through socialization and normative processes rather than longer-term legal processes and that enforcement mechanisms are the only modifiable treaty design choice with the potential to improve the effectiveness of treaties governing environmental, human rights, humanitarian, maritime, and security policy domains. This evidence synthesis raises doubts about the value of international treaties that neither regulate trade or finance nor contain enforcement mechanisms.
