This book comprises a series of essays by prominent academics and practitioners discussing modern mechanisms for the compliance and enforcement of multilateral environmental agreements. Each essay was originally presented at a conference initiated and supported by the German Federal Ministry for the Environment, Nature Conservation and Nuclear Safety, and the German Federal Environmental Agency. The conference took place in 2004 at the Max Planck Institute for Comparative Public Law and International Law in Heidelberg, Germany.

The issue of compliance is one of the most pressing contemporary issues in international environmental law. In an attempt to increase the level of compliance with provisions of multilateral environmental agreements, innovative mechanisms have been developed to encourage compliance. These mechanisms focus on cooperation, partnership and other non-adversarial measures as opposed to the more adversarial traditional dispute settlement processes. Under modern compliance provisions, non-complying State Parties can at times receive support with capacity-building as well as financial and technical assistance in order to be in a position to be able to comply.

This book provides insight into the structure, functioning and efficacy of various compliance mechanisms in a number of multilateral environmental agreements and highlights issues arising from the use of such techniques. The main body of the book consists of 20 essays (or chapters). While the volume is not explicitly arranged into sections, it can effectively be divided into six parts.

The first part of the book is a general chapter reflecting on the concept of ‘enforcement’ and approaches to compliance and enforcement in international environmental law and multilateral environmental agreements (Chapter One). The second part of the book surveys compliance mechanisms in a range of environmental agreements including the Vienna Convention for the Protection of the Ozone Layer; the Montreal Protocol on Substances that Deplete the Ozone Layer; the Convention on Long-Range Transboundary Air Pollution; the Framework Convention on Climate Change and the Kyoto Protocol; the Basel Convention on the Control of Transboundary Movements of Hazardous Wastes and Their Disposal; the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora; the Convention for the Protection of the Marine Environment of the North East Atlantic; the Convention on the Protection of the Marine Environment of the Baltic Sea Area; numerous international conventions relating to the protection of the marine environment against oil pollution; various international agreements for the protection of marine living resources; and finally the International Convention for the Regulation of Whaling (Chapters Two to Eleven). The third part investigates initiatives undertaken by various international organizations (in particular, the United Nations Environment Programme) to promote compliance with multilateral environmental agreements (Chapter Twelve) and examines various innovative methods to encourage compliance, such as reporting obligations and report assessments, inspections and external monitoring, sanctions, technical and financial assistance, and financial and other incentives to encourage compliance (Chapters Thirteen to Seventeen). The fourth part explores the role of non-governmental organizations in ensuring compliance with multilateral environmental agreements (Chapter Eighteen), while the fifth part investigates the relationship between non-compliance procedures and dispute settlement mechanisms (Chapter Nineteen). Finally, in the last part, Beyerlin, Stoll and Wolfrum draw conclusions from the conference and provide insights into and suggestions for the way forward (Chapter Twenty).

The book is useful for those wishing to read a succinct overview of modern compliance mechanisms contained within multilateral environmental treaties together with an exploration of related issues.

In the final chapter, Beyerlin, Stoll and Wolfrum provide some interesting suggestions to ensure more effective compliance with multilateral environmental agreements. In particular, they highlight the interdependence between the structure of the treaty regime and the design of compliance mechanisms, identify common elements of compliance mechanisms in multilateral environmental agreements, examine how compliance mechanisms in various multilateral environmental agreements might be coordinated or combined, consider the interrelationship between cooperative compliance mechanisms and traditional dispute settlement measures, and identify the role that non-governmental organizations can play at various stages of compliance procedures. Further development of these suggestions would have been beneficial.

Although the book is entitled Ensuring Compliance with Multilateral Environmental Agreements, the series of essays focuses primarily on a survey of current compliance mechanisms in multilateral environmental agreements. The book's title perhaps encourages a certain expectation of innovative solutions, which is not entirely met in the main body of the work. Further development of the concluding ideas would have gone a long way toward meeting such an expectation. Nevertheless, the book remains a valuable contribution to international environmental law scholarship on the difficult issue of compliance.