Weighing Benefits, Costs, and Trade-Offs
For potential benefits, we are not under the illusion that international legal agreements always yield positive outcomes. We know the empirical research literature is actually quite mixed: our recent review of 90 quantitative impact evaluations of international legal agreements across domains found that some agreements produced desired effects and others did not. Some impact evaluations even found that international legal agreements were counter productive to their aims and possibly caused harm. The only two studies evaluating international legal agreements’ health effects found structural adjustment agreements worsened basic literacy, infant mortality, and life expectancy at age one, and that international human rights agreements did not improve life expectancy, infant mortality, child mortality, or maternal mortality. Yet we also know that the global collective action problems preventing action on ABR require strong interdependent commitments from states to be overcome, and that international legal agreements formally represent the strongest possible way through which states can make commitments to each other.