The Design of International Environmental Regulations: The Concept of Stringency and a New Database in the Making

The paper conceptually and empirically explores the design of public international regulations of environmental impacts of business activities in transboundary contexts. It proposes a new concept of regulatory stringency to fill gaps in existing typologies of regulatory design from International Relations, International Law, and Economics. Stringency is defined as the tightness (or legalization) and ambition (or depth) of regulations, and operationalized through a two-tiered, multi-dimensional ordinal scale index. The usefulness of this concept and its operationalization is demonstrated by a newly compiled database that describes empirical variance in the stringency of public international environmental regulations of maritime industries, including maritime shipping and offshore energy production. The architecture and added value of the database is illustrated with examples from international regulations in sea regions such the Arctic, the Baltic Sea, the Mediterranean, and the North-East Atlantic. It is argued that maritime environmental regulations may serve as crucial case for assessing the explanatory power of competing hypotheses on the drivers of international regulation. In addition, interaction patterns between public and private industry regulations are discussed. The paper outlines puzzles that emerge from the data, and proposes an empirical strategy for future causal inquiry.