| The dissertation investigates the institutional and environmental effectiveness of two Antarctic agreements: the 1964 Agreed Measures for the Conservation of Antarctic Fauna and Flora and the 1991 Environmental Protocol to the Antarctic Treaty. It offers distinct conceptualizations of the two types of effectiveness and explores how the variables of treaty content, treaty implementation, and treaty compliance, affect the agreements' institutional and environmental effectiveness. For the purposes of this study, institutional effectiveness encompasses the fulfillment of an agreement's goals and objectives, while environmental effectiveness is concerned with the actual ecological benefits that flow from an agreement's operation. Here we are interested in such things as the conservation of living resources and the prevention or reduction of levels of anthropogenic contamination.;In addition to assessing the institutional performance and environmental impacts of the two agreements, the study more broadly explores the conceptual and theoretical dimensions of institutional and environmental effectiveness. What is institutional effectiveness and what affects it? What is environmental effectiveness and what affects it? How does institutional effectiveness affect environmental effectiveness? Because the majority of scholarly work on effectiveness has focused primarily on the formation and operation of environmental agreements and not on their actual environmental impacts, such a program of research is not only timely, but also contributes to our understanding of the differences between institutionally and environmentally effective institutions. |
