Strengthening Accountability Mechanisms

May 28, 2025

While states have adopted major international conventions on climate change, biodiversity, desertification and hundreds of other Multilateral Environmental Agreements (MEAs), degradation of the environment continues to accelerate. Current approaches to implementation are insufficient, lacking accountability mechanisms that could improve performance. When present, existing follow-up mechanisms 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.

Read the policy brief by the Stimson Center – written by Sylvia Karlsson-Vinkhuyzen and Arthur Lyon Dahl, giving three options for strengthening accountability in global environmental governance – here.