The Concept of Regime `Effectiveness'

Abstract

Two major questions in the study of international cooperation are: (i) Under which conditions is some kind of cooperative arrangement likely to be established? (ii) Under which conditions will the arrangement established be effective? Arguing that good reasons can be given for shifting some of our research efforts from the former to the latter question, and that a fair amount of conceptual groundwork remains to be done in order that regime `effectiveness' can be systematically studied, the author briefly examines three questions: (i) What precisely is the object to be evaluated? (ii) Against which standard is this object to be evaluated? And, (iii) what kinds of measurement operations do we have to perform in order to attribute a certain score of `effectiveness' to a certain arrangement?