Options for Strengthening Accountability Mechanisms in Global Environmental Governance

States have adopted major international conventions on climate change, biodiversity, desertification and hundreds of other Multilateral Environmental Agreements (MEAs). However, degradation of the environment continues to accelerate.

This is due in large part to the fact that current approaches to implementation are insufficient, lacking accountability mechanisms that could improve performance. Implementation mechanisms that do exist are explicitly facilitative and exclude sanctions.

This issue brief outlines three principal options for strengthening accountability mechanisms, and thereby the implementation of MEAs:
1) increase the effectiveness of current facilitative mechanisms in the short-term;
2) increase the use of ‘coercive’ informal and formal accountability mechanisms outside the individual MEA; and
3) persuade states to agree to stronger sanctions-based mechanisms in the long-term.

The paper also suggests some ways forward when there is strong state resistance, which is common.

• For deeper institutional changes, sudden disasters could open a policy window for fast change.
• It might help to modify the interpretation of what consensus means, since the consensus rule allows any one country to block agreement.
• The deficit in trust for both governments and the UN due to past failures in implementing commitments can, in part, be addressed by creating transparent accountability mechanisms.
• The Pact for the Future brings traction to calls for accountability mechanisms it makes as the Pact was adopted by the UN General Assembly without opposition.