Stalemate in the Anthropocene: Ineffective Treaties and the Struggle for Planetary Governance

ORCID

Damoah: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9204-3395; Keengwe: https://orcid.org/0009-0002-6935-2189; Ofori: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0725-5466

MSU Affiliation

College of Arts and Sciences; Department of Geosciences

Creation Date

2026-09-30

Abstract

This paper traces the evolution of selected global environmental agreements from 1971 to 2025 and asks why the increasing density of international environmental governance has not been matched by commensurate improvement in planetary conditions. Using qualitative comparative document analysis of exemplar instruments across climate, biodiversity, and pollution, the study codes obligation form, implementation and compliance arrangements, coordination mechanisms, finance, and justice provisions, and interprets those features against authoritative system-level assessments. The paper does not treat the entire collection of environmental agreements as a single global regime complex. Instead, it draws on regime-complex and fragmentation scholarship to examine interactions among distinct issue-specific regimes and regime complexes within the wider governance architecture. Three deliberately bounded diagnostic dimensions organize the comparison: implementation and compliance at the regime and domestic levels; fragmentation and coordination at the architectural level; and distributive and procedural justice as conditions affecting legitimacy and implementation capacity. These dimensions are not presented as exhaustive causal determinants, and treaty proliferation is not assumed to be inherently harmful. The analysis finds that implementation continues to lag negotiated ambition; fragmentation varies across issue areas and can enable experimentation but generate costs where coordination is weak; and persistent disputes over finance, technology, participation, and burden-sharing constrain implementation. The severity of the outcome gap is evident in continued growth of greenhouse-gas emissions, the failure to fully achieve any of the twenty Aichi Biodiversity Targets, continuing biodiversity decline, and approximately nine million pollution-attributable deaths annually. The paper concludes that additional agreements are unlikely to improve outcomes when they are not paired with implementation capacity, coherent coordination, predictable finance, and fair compliance arrangements. It proposes implementation-centered Conferences of the Parties, proportionate facilitation-plus compliance, deliberate inter-regime coordination, and justice-oriented reforms in finance and participation.

Keywords

multilateral environmental agreements. international environmental governance, regime complexity, institutional fragmentation, implementation and compliance, environmental justice, planetary boundaries

Publication Date

8-5-2026

Publication Title

Environmental Development

Publisher

Elsevier

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Rights

© 2026 The Authors

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Digital Object Identifier (DOI)

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.envdev.2026.101537