Comparison Of The Effectiveness Of The Mechanisms Of Cross-border Acid Rain Pollution Control

Acid Rain is a typical transboundary environmental problem. Its unique attributes require a special transboundary environmental governance regime, which is different from domestic environmental governance regime or global environmental governance regime. It could be defined as follows:in order to solve the environmental damage or pollution in shared regions, two or more geographically bordered or near-by countries decide to create a regime to cooperate and coordinate with each other by establishing a new international regime or using a current bilateral or multilateral one. As of acid rain governance, the transboundary environmental governance regime only exists in North America and Europe.After reviewing existing explanations about the effectiveness of international regime, the author gives the definition of the effectiveness of transboundary environmental regime, which is the degree that the regime achieves its initiated goals and realizes its anticipatory functions. Instead of problem-solving point of view, this approach appears to be more practical. The author then introduces a simple 5-point system to evaluate the effectiveness of the existing transboundary acid rain governance regimes in five important aspects, including information-collection level, cooperation-and-coordination level, implementation level, funding level, and dispute-solving level.Then the paper studies on both the transboundary acid rain governance regimes in North America and in Europe. The North American regime appears to be a double-level governance mode constructed from the bottom to the top while the European regime is a multi-level governance mode constructed from the top to the bottom. According to above five aspects, the author adopts the 5-point system to evaluate and compare the effectiveness of the two transboundary acid rain governance regimes and comes to the conclusion.The overall effectiveness of European regime is higher than that of North American regime. After giving a short explanation to the conclusion, this paper provides some policy suggestions to the transboundary acid rain governance regime in East Asia.