Creating Regimes

Oran R. Young is a key participant in recent debates among international relations scholars about the dynamics of rule-making and rule-following in international society. In this book, he weaves together theoretical issues relating to the formation of international regimes and substantive issues relating to the emergence of the Arctic as a distinct region in world affairs. Young divides the overall process of regime formation into three stages—agenda formation, negotiation, and operationalization—and argues that each stage has its own particular political dynamics. Efforts to explain or predict developments in specific issue areas, he suggests, require careful attention to each stage in the process. Empirically, Young examines in detail the events leading to the formation of the Arctic Environmental Protection Strategy and the Barents Euro-Arctic Region. Although these cases exhibit the defining characteristics of all international regimes, they broaden our understanding of institutional arrangements that are largely programmatic, rather than regulatory, in nature and that are based on soft-law agreements.

Creating Regimes is a highly persuasive and perceptive work about two international regimes that have become central to nonmilitary cooperation in the Arctic in recent years.... Provides helpful insights into current policy and legal issue at the poles., This book is to my knowledge the first to account for the emergence of Arctic cooperation explicitly employing concepts from the literature on regimes, and it reinforces the author's longstanding efforts to draw attention to the Arctic as a test-bed for examining various aspects of regime analysis. The fact that Oran Young has at times himself been a 'player' in Arctic cooperation adds to the validity of his insights., Young's latest volume is in many ways a logical extension of his Polar Politics; it builds on his experience as a theorist of international organization and his experience with regime-building in the circumpolar north.... Young is not presenting another grand theory of regime formation but a needed corrective to the tendency to find single-factor explanations.

Oran R. Young is Professor of Environmental Studies and Director of the Institute of Arctic Studies at Dartmouth College. He is the author of many previous books, including three from Cornell, of which the most recent is International Governance: Protecting the Environment in a Stateless Society.