Compliance

Compliance, simply put, is the extent to which an actor fulfils its obligations. In the realm of international relations, scholars are most concerned with state compliance and have focused their attention on the degree to which states conform to the prescriptions and proscriptions stipulated by their international commitments.

Interest in compliance has burgeoned as states increasingly construct and enter into rule-based governance arrangements to guide behavior and solve problems in a variety of issue areas, such as trade, security, human rights, and the environment. Scholarship on international cooperation, regimes, law, and institutions has focused on why states do or do not comply with their international obligations and what conditions and institutional features facilitate compliance.

The subject of compliance is often connected to the debate over the importance and efficacy of international institutions, but the relationship between compliance and effectiveness is a murky one. There is widespread agreement that compliance is not sufficient for effectiveness; however, there is a debate over whether and to what extent high levels of compliance are necessary for, or at least associated with, consequential institutions and effective agreements.

Scholars from the realist tradition are generally skeptical that international institutions and law are significant determinants of state behavior. In the view of the majority of realists, power relations are the most reliable predictor of international outcomes, and states often strive to avoid complying with inconvenient obligations. In cases where compliance rates are high, realists tend to see the outcome as the result of shallow agreements that reflect the law of the least ambitious party or as [Page 368]merely codifications of what states would have done even in the absence of an agreement.

Other perspectives, such as neoliberal institutionalism and social constructivism, are more sanguine regarding the potential influence of international institutions and agreements Neoliberal institutionalism, with its rationalistic metatheoretical orientation and focus on constellations of interests, sees high levels of compliance with international rules as a possibility. Moreover, compliance or even good-faith efforts that fall short of full compliance, together with other factors such as the achievement of policy goals and behavioral change, can be treated as an indicator for evaluating the impact of international institutions and agreements. This perspective holds that states operate according to a logic of consequence and that institutional design matters in influencing how states will calculate their interests and goals and evaluate the costs and benefits of compliance or noncompliance. Institutional properties and mechanisms, such as monitoring capabilities and verification systems (e.g., the International Atomic Energy Agency's safeguard system fulfills this role in the case of the nuclear nonproliferation regime), can result in increased transparency, greater information, and the creation of material (sanctions, loss of privileges) and social (reputational) costs for noncompliant behavior.

Social constructivist and normative approaches take the position that international institutions and regulations are meaningful and that their norms and rules tend to enjoy widespread compliance. As the legal scholar Louis Henkin (1979, p. 47) concluded, “Almost all nations observe almost all principles of international law and almost all of their obligations almost all of the time.” Social constructivism, which has a sociological metatheoretical orientation, emphasizes the interplay between norms and identity and stresses knowledge and communication dynamics to explain state behavior. Constructivists see states as role players and have found that international institutions can play an important role in socializing states to accept and internalize particular norms and rules. In their view, decisions about compliance are driven by a logic of appropriateness that reflects intersubjective normative understandings and identity concerns. Behavior is not strictly determined by rational calculations of the state's interests but by deeper norms and shared beliefs about what actions and policies are legitimate and appropriate in international relations (Thomas Franck, 1990, pp. 205–207). Therefore, from this perspective, the decision to comply with international provisions concerning issues such as slavery, piracy, human rights, the use of chemical weapons, and the acquisition of nuclear weapons serves the important function of both shaping and reflecting a state's identity.

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