After compliance in India and beyond: a theory of implementation dilemmas and comparative institutional analysis

ABSTRACT

Using India as a theory building case, this paper puts forward a theoretical framework for understanding countries’ responses to global rules and implementation effects across diverse global governance regimes and contexts. The initial premise for this paper is that the strategic structure of implementation dilemmas faced by states and actors within countries need to be understood in addition to design dilemmas. Successful global regimes must not only solve cooperation and uncertainty problems at the initial stages in choosing the right institutional matrix, but also ‘require changes in domestic institutions.’ The need to change domestic institutions creates certain implementation dilemmas. These dilemmas are a joint product of the institutional design, specific policy issue and the domestic logic of responses after international agreements have been signed. This broader idea helps understand a wide variety of India’s interactions across global governance institutions. I also suggest a novel empirical strategy of cross-institutional analysis to assess implementation dilemmas. While we have numerous cross-national studies of how compliance occurs in a wide variety of countries, we lack theory-driven, empirically grounded, comparative studies of a single country or a group of countries across diverse global regimes. Such a framework can help us better understand how countries interact with a variety of global institutions and the reciprocal effects. This framework is then used to understand India’s interactions with diverse global regimes in an illustrative manner in this article, and in greater detail by other authors in the section published in this issue of Contemporary South Asia.

KEYWORDS:

• Emerging powers
• implementation
• compliance
• international organizations
• comparative theory
• Global Governance
• institutional design
• cross-institutional analysis

Acknowledgements

I thank the two reviewers for insightful comments and feedback. Gregory Shaffer’s and Rani Mullen’s comments were very helpful. Nisha Singh, and Anya Syed, students at CMC, helped with some research for the paper including cross-checking references.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 The UN, World Bank, the WTO, the climate regime, and the IMF have generated the largest literature. See, Coplovitch (2010), Stone (2002, 2011), and Woods (2006). On the environment see, Bodansky (2001) and Speth and Haas (2006). On the WTO see Hopewell (2016).

2 A few exceptions are Kaya (2015), Weller and Yi-Chong (2015), Yi-chong and Weller (2018) and Kirton and Trebilock (2016).

3 Exceptions are Kent (2007); Kennedy (2018).

4 The Long-Range Transboundary Air Pollution Convention (LRTAP) relies on self-reporting to assess whether the country has reduced emissions.

5 Keohane (1989, 4–5) defines them as: ‘Commonality: the degree to which expectations about appropriate behavior and understandings about how to interpret action are shared by participants in the system; Specificity: The degree to which these expectations are clearly specified in the form of rules; and Autonomy: The extent to which institution can alter its own rules rather than relying entirely on outside agents to do so.'

6 This idea is drawn from the Ulysses pact in the Homer’s Odyssey, wherein Ulysses had himself tied to the mast so that he could not leave his ship to be tempted by the sirens, thereby fating his possible death.

7 Transaction costs may be defined as the varied costs of implementing agreements such as passing laws, or setting up patent offices (Sinha 2016, 37).

8 For example, countries implementing patents laws had to hire patent examiners.

9 Exceptions are Kent (2007) and Kennedy (2018).

10 India’s experience with challenging implementation of farm laws may provide some useful insight about implementation dilemmas.

11 I thank a reviewer for comments on this idea.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Aseema Sinha

Aseema Sinha is a professor at Claremont McKenna College in California, USA. She previously taught at University of Wisconsin–Madison and was a Fellow at the Woodrow Wilson Center in DC. She is the author of The Regional Roots of Developmental Politics in India (2005), which received the Joseph Elder Prize in the Indian Social Sciences. Her second book is Globalizing India: How Global Rules and Markets are Shaping India's Rise to Power (CUP, 2016). She has published in British Journal of Political Science, World Development, Comparative Political Studies, Comparative Politics, Business and Politics, Journal of Democracy, India Review, among others.