Exploring the Option of a New Global Agreement on Marine Plastic Pollution – A Guide to the Issues

What is a global agreement?

Figure 3: Selected conventions – the time it takes

States negotiate and enter into agreements in order to solve common problems and/or set common standards. In general, a global agreement can be thought of as a diplomatic tool to: (1) formulate a shared understanding of an issue of international, transnational, or global concern; (2) articulate a set of obligations, commitments, and authorizations that States would commit to with the aim of addressing the issue of concern; and (3) establish the institutional structures and other collective arrangements between States needed to facilitate the realization of the agreement’s purpose.

Purpose, structure, and treaty elements

Agreements between States can be understood as strategic tools of foreign policy – tools that enable States to pursue their objectives across national borders. As such, they tend to address situations in which some States’ goal achievement is influenced or impacted by the actions or omissions of other States. In the field of environmental law, many global agreements arise out of an identified need to overcome so-called collective action problems ; that is, a situation “in which the uncoordinated actions of each player may not result in the best outcome”. 51 Quite often,

51 Garrett W Brown, Iain McLean, and Alistair McMillan (2018), A Concise Oxford Dictionary of Politics and International Relations (4 ed.) , Oxford University Press Print Publication. In game theory, a famous example of a collective action problem is the so-called prisoner’s dilemma.

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