A Sociological Look at the Efficacy of International Environmental Norms

Despite the abundance of international environmental norms, for various reasons, such as their implementation conflict with the developmental concerns of countries or the lack of consensus at the global level regarding environmental hazards, these norms have not been effective. The GEO-6 report in 2019 states that without additional policies, the trends in environmental degradation are projected to continue at a rapid rate and neither the Sustainable Development Goal targets nor other internationally agreed environmental goals are expected to be achieved, including the set goals regarding climate change, biodiversity loss, water scarcity, excess nutrient run-off, land degradation and ocean acidification, and so on.  The usual procedure in legal research in such cases is to turn the audience's attention to the lack of a sufficient guarantee of these norms, the separation of domestic legal systems from the international, or the absence of necessary criminalization. Without intending to question these conventional legal researches, this essay has tried to take a different path to deal with the challenges related to the "efficacy” or “effectiveness” of such laws with a sociological approach. Generally, having in mind the link between society and law, which is expressed in some famous and proverbial sentences such as "where there is society, there is law (Ubi Societas ibi jus) ", reference to the society and providing a sociological analysis of individuals’ behavior and their reaction to the legal rules in domestic societies or the international community seems useful and even necessary. A sociological look at the factors of the underlying ineffectiveness of environmental norms brings forward theories about environmental sociology and social or economic justice, whose possible role and effects in international environmental law the current research aims to evaluate, with a descriptive-analytical approach and using library research.

Research Question(s):

An important question that we should seek to answer is why the mass of environmental norms are not as efficient as they should be, and governments, as the main members of the international community, have not shown much interest in employing and implementing them. The fact is that to increase the efficiency of legal norms, it is useful and even necessary to pay attention to the coordination between the rules and regulations and weigh them according to the standards of justice, rationality, social values, freedom, equality, etc. This is what we are trying to demonstrate through the concept of socialization of laws. In examining the effectiveness of laws, the formal legal binding of a rule is not taken into account alone, rather, some cases should be studied through a meta-analysis to analyze the individuals’ behavior towards these norms. the result of such analysis is the effective implementation of legal rules as much as possible.

Literature Review:

The current article deals with the efficacy of environmental norms in an interdisciplinary manner and it has not been yet researched and investigated to the extent of the authors' knowledge.

Although, the efficacy of legal norms is raised after the formation or the identification of them, by observing the executive effects of legal norms and their pathology after their creation or recognition, we pave the way for their possible revision and proposing a reform in the legal system. Therefore, the purpose of this article is not only to look at the establishment of the norms and to examine the effectiveness of environmental sociological theories, but it also examines the behavior of international actors, especially governments, concerning pre-established norms. In this way, the methodology of this research in some parts is “Intrasystem” although it is mostly “Intersystem”; because, beyond the international environmental law system, it considers the role of other regimes. As an Intersystem study, in the framework of the present topic, the researcher is allowed, after observing the degree of realization of the rules in social practice, to review the entire process before and after the formation of the rules until their implementation.

Currently, despite the adoption of numerous environmental norms, for various reasons, countries, in general, have not shown much approval towards the implementation of environmental obligations. Two important factors of the inefficacy of these norms are: 1) their conflict with governments’ developmental concerns and, 2)Lack of consensus and sufficient scientific knowledge at the global level.
through referring to some sociological theories, the following article seeks to find ways to strengthen environmental norms (at the stage of establishing these environmental norms) and to influence the behavior of governments towards environmental obligations (at the stage of implementing the mentioned norms).
This research hypothesizes that by opening the door of international environmental law to some sociological theories and distancing it from others, it would be possible to achieve more efficient and effective environmental norms.