The 1972 Stockholm Conference on the Human Environment was a watershed moment for global efforts to protect the environment. One of its main achievements was to serve as the inspiration for the development of the UN Economic Commission for Europe’s (UNECE) Air Pollution Treaties, with the 1979 Convention on Long-Range Transboundary Air Pollution seeing considerable success in Europe. The attempts to replicate these models elsewhere, especially in the global South, have been far less successful and provide valuable case studies on the limits of legal transplantation. In Southern Africa, a lack of state capacity and data collection has prevented substantial progress on a multilateral framework convention. Northeast Asia suffers from the opposite problem whereby a host of overlapping multilateral initiatives are stifling the development of a coherent framework. Finally, Southeast Asia, while possessing a binding multilateral convention has failed to reduce haze pollution either by use of soft or hard obligations. Ultimately, the importation of the model for the UNECE’s air pollution treaties must acknowledge regional contexts and, in some cases, include international assistance to developing states.