Research

Civil society is one central factor in addressing the gap between countries’ domestic climate change mitigation goals and the global target of limiting the average temperature increase to well below 2°C. This paper is a contribution to our understanding of the relationship between different aspects of civil society engagement: civil society engagement in governance processes, mass protests, strategic litigation efforts, and policy ambition. In a panel of 43 countries, we find that the degree of civil society commitment and the extent of strategic litigation efforts are associated with increased domestic climate policy ambition. By contrast, an increase in the number and intensity of mass protests has no bearing on policy performance and may indeed have an adverse effect. The implication from this is that significant civic work on existing structures is needed to advance policies successfully. Protest alone will not do the trick. Contrary to theoretical assumptions and some of the empirical literature, the presence of strong democratic institutions does not necessarily lead to better climate policies. Our findings are sensitive to the way we measure climate policy ambition. This is both an indication for the difficulty of defining and measuring policy ambition and an opportunity to achieve a better understanding of the processes that may be involved.

R&R at Global Environmental Politics

Socio-legal theories of international law often build upon the idea of Communities of Practice (CoPs). CoPs are, however, usually assumed but not investigated empirically. We adopt an empirical-behavioral perspective and take the idea of a CoP’ existence as a testable proposition: members should be expected to behave in ways that distinguish them from outsiders. We focus on a community of exceeding importance and subject to legal regulation: frontline humanitarian negotiators. In two sets of experiments, we compare their and laypeople behavior. Humanitarian negotiators are less susceptible to cognitive biases, but only if the task is situated in their professional field. They are more faithful to international humanitarian rules and law, even if this jeopardizes the success of a humanitarian mission. Adopting such an empirical-behavioral perspective not only makes socio-legal practice theory testable; it also facilitates inter-paradigmatic discourse between emerging theoretical and methodological approaches to international law.

Corruption plays a constitutive role in the global illegal wildlife trade (IWT), operating both as a cause and as an effect of trafficking. As a cause, corruption enables poaching, transport, and commercialization by means of bribery, falsified CITES documentation, laundering through captive-breeding facilities, and regulatory capture in biodiversity-rich states. As a effect, IWT revenues finance further corruption, distort local economies, and undermine rule-of-law institutions, thereby entrenching cycles of impunity. Corruption is not merely a facilitator of wildlife crime; it is part of a self-reinforcing system. Recent scholarship on “green corruption” highlights the inadequacy of purely punitive or legalistic responses. This article argues that the integration of behavioral science into anti-corruption strategies offers a complementary framework for disrupting wildlife crime and especially IWT. Empirical evidence from public-integrity and compliance studies suggests that randomized audits, targeted transparency and messages, and independent verification can alter perceived detection risks; norm-based interventions—such as integrity pledges, role rotation, and conflict-of-interest disclosures—reduce opportunities for misconduct; and demand-reduction campaigns achieve impact only when grounded in social norms and behavior change methodologies. Combining these measures with digital permitting systems, anomaly detection tools, and community-aligned incentives provides a pathway for addressing both institutional loopholes and the behavioral drivers of corruption. By drawing on criminology, international law, and behavioral economics, the article conceptualizes corruption in IWT not merely as a governance deficit but as a patterned set of practices that can be reshaped through evidence-based behavioral interventions.

For: Anja Matwijkiw (ed.). Crime and Corruption. Serious Economic Crimes and International Criminal Law – Shaping a New Era of International Law and Justice, Brill 

Strategic litigation is an increasingly prominent instrument in climate governance, yet its drivers remain poorly understood. While previous research shows that litigation can influence climate policy, little is known about how international climate policy affects the incidence of litigation. We compile a panel dataset of 42 countries between 2007 and 2022, combining measures of international policy performance, stringency, and density with data on strategic climate cases. Our analysis shows that stronger climate policy performance and an increased number of international climate policies is associated with more litigation, while an increase in policy stringency shows no relation to litigation cases in our sample. A higher democracy score and increased NGO activity in a country are also associated with increased litigation activity in a country. This supports the theoretical expectations of litigation as mechanism through which international commitments are translated into domestic accountability.

In the last decade, the number of strategic climate change litigation (SCCL) cases has exponentially increased. Despite this trend, the question whether SCCL as an advocacy tool can really influence public opinion using the law and the judicial system has yet to be examined empirically. This paper proposes the concept of legal cueing as a novel theoretical conceptualization to empirically analyze whether and how strategic litigation may affect public opinion. Legal cueing is defined here as the transmission of a normative legal signal underlying information on a court’s decision on a societal matter, which provides a strong indication that legal norms are shifting. We situate legal cueing within the law and social movements literature and operationalize the concept drawing on the experimental elite cueing literature and research on social norms from different disciplines. Finally, we make suggestions for utilizing the concept in future empirical work.

Full text: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4205520 

In this paper, we argue that compliance should be understood as a process involving a web of interdependent relationships, sub-processes, and infrastructures that shape and determine the ways in which compliance with international law occurs. By understanding compliance as a process, we can better appreciate the ways in which compliance with international law is shaped and determined by the interactions and relationships among these various actors and factors. This perspective can also help to identify the key drivers and challenges of compliance, and to develop strategies for enhancing compliance with international law in the future. But it can also – and this is crucial – help us identify vulnerabilities in the compliance processes—a problem we refer to in the paper as compliance vulnerability. To better understand and identify the actors, pathways, and constraints involved in compliance with international law and their role in causing and addressing compliance vulnerabilities, we need to use new methodologies that allow us to map interlinked phenomena, the behaviour of actors at different levels, and the links between these actors. These methodologies can also help us experiment with different scenarios and explore the potential outcomes of different compliance strategies. But most importantly, they can show us emergent behaviour, that is vulnerabilities in the system, the infrastructure, when these are pushed too far. By mapping out these pathways and networks, we aim to provide a more comprehensive and nuanced understanding of compliance with international law, and to identify the key drivers and challenges of compliance in the future. 

Experiments on social norm interventions suggest that public dissemination of normative information, which creates common knowledge on a social norm, increases conformity to the social norm more effectively than privately disseminated information, regardless of other factors affecting norm conformity, such as group identity and heterogeneous endowments. We present an experimental test of the effect that the channel of dissemination - public vs. private – has on norm conformity at different levels of group identity in a setting. Participants receive a normative message about the behavior that participants of a previous experiment identified as the “fairest.” We vary between strong and weak group identity, and public and private information, and record participants' compliance with the provided social norm. To strengthen the test, we introduce heterogeneous endowments. Our results suggest that the effect of public normative information depends on the composition of the groups and initial endowment of participants. At best, it has no effect on norm conformity.  However, in the heterogeneous setting, it reduces norm conformity among those with lower endowments. This poses challenges for eliciting a behavioral change using normative information since providing public information can easily backfire.

We develop an agent-based model to investigate the mechanisms that determine state compliance with European Court of Human Rights judgments. Tasked with upholding the European Convention on Human Rights, the Court sanctions hu-man rights violations. The Council of Ministers and the Department of Execution oversee the state-side implementation of remedies in response to the judgments rendered by the Court, as states determine these remedies themselves. To increase compliance with Court judgments, relevant actors must understand why some cases remain unenforced, while others are complied with, how states pick reme-dies and learn from each other. To that end, we use quantitative and qualitative data collected by the Human Rights Nudge project to construct an agent-based model that connects individual state behaviour with the overall outcome of many compliance processes running in parallel and includes learning processes between states. We discuss interventions that can be implemented and how those interventions impact trade-offs between surface level compliance with judgments and ac-tual implementation of human rights improvements.

Strategic climate change litigation is a rising phenomenon that has attracted considerable academic interest. Still, limited understanding exists of the effects of strategic litigation cases outside the courtroom – more specifically, on whether strategic litigation can influence public attitudes on climate change policy. To fill this gap, based on the concepts of legal cueing and elite cueing, we conduct a pre-registered vignette experiment with a quota-representative sample of UK citizens to study the impact of information on strategic climate change litigation on stated and revealed preferences for climate policy measures. We furthermore perform an exploratory analysis of participants’ demographic characteristics and their expressed sentiment towards a carbon tax. Overall, the experiment returns null results, suggesting no direct link between strategic climate litigation and policy attitudes in our experimental setup. We discuss how legal cues may affect attitudes in a more indirect and cumulative manner.

Paper available here: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.irle.2024.106213

In international law studies on compliance in general and compliance with court judgments, there is an assumption of states being compliant by default, and compliance being understood in terms of isolated acts of individual states. Empirical research on compliance with European Court of Human Rights judgments has questioned the first theoretical assumption, and has produced insights into the compliance dynamics within the Council of Europe. One such insight shows an initial “conditional generosity” of the European Human Rights system towards non-compliers which did not impede (or even facilitated) a gradual development of better compliance rates among the states. However, even empirical research often leaves the second theoretical assumption untouched. In the present contribution, we report on a model of the 47 (now 46) member states of the Council of Europe as a dynamic network of unitary actors and explore with a threshold model how the norm of compliance-with-ECtHR-judgements moves within the network, and how states associate and disassociate from one another in the course of establishing and spreading a norm. With the model, we aim to contribute to the discussion around these theoretical assumptions and empirical findings by showing that (a) rather than strictly favoring compliance under all conditions, the network of states tends towards non-compliance often, (b) the behavior of compliance is not and cannot be seen as a series of isolated actions by individual states, and that (c) compliance rates are locked in relatively quickly and subsequently do not change much over time. 

Paper available here: https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-3420/paper3.pdf

Since its inception in 2010, ESSA@work has been a mainstay at the annual Social Simulation Conference (SSC). It continues as a forum where beginners in individual- and agent-based modelling (hereon, ABM) present a work-in-progress model, along with specific problems and questions, to a community of practitioners to get feedback, suggestions, and tips for specific aspects of their modelling projects. During the session, participants present their model to an audience and two experts, the latter of whom are chosen for their constructive style of feedback and broad expertise. Participants are not required to answer questions or defend their work, as might be the case in a more traditional setting. Instead, experts enter into a dialogue with each other with the explicit goal of providing constructive feedback towards the progress of the project. After the expert discussion, the audience can also add constructive ideas and questions. Over the years, a few themes that characterise ESSA@work have crystallised and indicate the importance of the track. In this contribution, we outline these themes: how ESSA@work provides a learning experience to participants and the audience, as well as the organisers; how it fosters interdisciplinarity; and how it builds upon a community of practice. We conclude with our wishes for its future.

Contribution available here: https://rofasss.org/tag/essawork/

Agent-based modeling has been largely overlooked in international legal research, even though it could be used to gain insights into the highly complex processes of state behavior relevant to international law that can only be insufficiently addressed with other methods. On the basis of a concrete application – state compliance with European Court of Human Rights judgments - we show the applicability of agent-based modeling to international legal research. We discuss its implications for two levels of analysis: (1) understanding the drivers of state behavior, which contributes to the international law research with unitary state actors at its center, and (2) within state dynamics and their influence during the compliance process, which breaks the black box of the state. Agent-based models addressing the questions that arise on these levels can take a variety of shapes. We provide one line of thought on the set-up of an agent-based model for each of the two levels of analysis and discuss expected difficulties. Finally, we provide an outlook on how these aspects might come together in exploring how compliance rates can be bettered. 

Paper available here: https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-3182/paper5.pdf

Social movements are an important part of a functioning society – also on a global scale. I argue that the internet and social media enable the formation of informal civil society movements and provide the means for such movements to participate in the shaping of international law to an unprecedented extent. In addition to being key to collective action and thus the formation of informal civil society movements in the first place, communication technology enables such movements to (a) bypass nation state politics, (b) develop normative claims, and (c) change the setting in which international law is made. I outline these mechanisms of engagement theoretically and show them in a case study of the current anti-climate change movement, spearheaded by Fridays for Future, serves as a case study. The paper closes with suggestions for the empirical study of the mechanisms of engagement.