It is now 20 years since the United Nations conference on environment and development, better known as the earth summit was held in Rio de Janeiro. An important achievement of the conference was an agreement on the climate change convention which in turn led to the Kyoto Protocol. Another was...

This paper uses a political principal-agent model to analyze the process by which international environmental treaties are negotiated and ratified. To the extent that political principals hire negotiators on the basis of their negotiation skills rather than their policy preferences, negotiators...