A number of recent international environmental regimes including the Sustainable Development Goals, the Paris Agreement on climate change and the Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction rely on soft law featuring voluntary action, wide-ranging provisions for participants and non-binding commitments, while skirting the idea of sanctions. Because of the increasing prevalence of soft law regimes, their intuitional design attributes and characteristics give rise to new questions about regime effectiveness. Concepts such as compliance and participation that originate from the assessment of the effectiveness of hard law regimes need to be revisited and adapted to this new subset with its distinct characteristics. The aim of this study, then, is to empirically investigate the prospects of effectiveness in the specific case of the Hyogo Framework for Action 2005–2015 on disaster risk reduction (DRR) as an illustrative case study of soft law regimes. The study, thereby, examines participation and compliance as key factors of regime effectiveness by analysing data and descriptive statistics based on national reports and their indicators on DRR measures. The study not only aims to advance the understanding of concepts central to the assessment of regime effectiveness in the context of soft law regimes. It also investigates DRR for the first time on a global scale from a regime effectiveness perspective documenting variation on the country level and serving as a guide to interesting cases and comparative research for future study.

中文翻译：

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国际环境制度中软法的有效性：参与和遵守《兵库行动框架》

最近的一些国际环境制度，包括可持续发展目标、关于气候变化的巴黎协定和仙台减少灾害风险框架，都依赖于以自愿行动、对参与者的广泛规定和不具约束力的承诺为特征的软法，同时绕过了制裁的想法。由于软法制度的日益流行，其直观的设计属性和特征引发了有关制度有效性的新问题。源于对硬法制度有效性的评估的合规和参与等概念需要重新审视并适应这一具有鲜明特征的新子集。那么，这项研究的目的是，是在《2005-2015 年兵库行动框架》关于减少灾害风险 (DRR) 的具体案例中，实证研究有效性的前景，作为软法制度的说明性案例研究。因此，该研究通过分析基于国家报告及其关于 DRR 措施的指标的数据和描述性统计数据，将参与和遵守作为制度有效性的关键因素进行检查。该研究不仅旨在促进对软法制度背景下对制度有效性评估的核心概念的理解。它还首次从制度有效性的角度在全球范围内调查了 DRR，记录了国家层面的变化，并作为未来研究有趣案例和比较研究的指南。