Methodological issues in the study of broader consequences
The study of the broader effects of international regimes is just beginning. For a long time, regime analysts operated with a two-fold fiction, namely that a regime could be established largely in isolation from other regimes and that its consequences were concentrated to its own domain. In the real world, the international system is increasingly densely populated by international governing institutions. A study elaborated for the Rio Summit of 1992 counted more than 125 important multilateral environmental regimes alone, most of which were institutionalized separately from each other (Sand 1992). Every year, states conclude about five new important environmental agreements (Beisheim et al. 1999: 350 – 51). Against the backdrop of this trend and the sheer number of independently established international regimes, it is difficult to image that interaction among regimes is an irrelevant phenomenon.