The desirability of administrative proceduralisation: compliance rules and decisions in multilateral environmental agreements

The legitimacy of administrative proceduralisation, which describes the process of adoption of procedural tools of an administrative character in global governance, is contested in the literature. This thesis addresses this debate by proposing a new purposive legitimacy framework, which facilitates evaluation of the extent to which administrative procedures achieve desirable purposes in global regulatory bodies. Specifically, this framework examines the roles played by these procedures in: (1) constraining political influences on administrative decision making; and (2) promoting procedural regard for the interests of less powerful states. In this framework, a synthesis of insights from global administrative law, regulatory theory, international environmental law and third world approaches to international law informs the identification of concrete, institutional practices associated with each purpose, which provide tangible criteria for evaluating the desirability of administrative proceduralisation. By linking normative aspirations at a medium level of abstraction with specific procedural and decisional inputs, this framework offers a middle-level theoretical approach to evaluating legitimacy claims. As such, the purposive legitimacy approach departs from, yet complements, the conventional categories of normative and descriptive legitimacy in international law scholarship.The purposive legitimacy framework is applied to the compliance systems of the Kyoto Protocol, the Montreal Protocol and the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Fauna and Flora. This evaluative process demonstrates that administrative procedures play, at best, moderately legitimating roles in these settings. First, there is a clear trajectory towards greater administrative proceduralisation in these compliance systems. Secondly, a trend is evident in which administrative procedures constrain politics in some domains, yet frequently these gains are offset by the prevalence and re-assertion of political decision-making modes in other areas of compliance decision making with less stringent procedural safeguards. Thirdly, there is little evidence of administrative procedures being co-opted by powerful states. However, with the notable exception of the Montreal compliance system, the potential for these procedures to promote procedural regard for weaker states’ interests remains largely untapped. Thus, administrative procedures play positive, but not transformative, roles in shaping and constraining political influences on compliance decision making