U.S.-Latin America Dissertation Enhancement: The Impact of Global Environmental Agreements on Biodiversity Policy in Bolivia and Costa Rica

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9603023 Press This Americas Program award will fund a dissertation enhancement project for Paul Steinberg, University of California, Santa Cruz, under the supervision of Dr. Daniel Press. They will be working with Dr. Carlos Quesada-Mateo, Director of the Center for Research on Sustainable Development, University of Costa Rica, and in Bolivia with Professor Kathy Mihotek, Universidad Autonoma Moreno, Santa Cruz. The research project will analyze the trajectory of species preservation efforts in Bolivia and Costa Rica over the past twenty-five years, to explore to what extent international conservation agreements have influenced national policies, and by what means. Specifically, they will test two hypotheses. First, to see if international agreements have catalyzed changes in cultural values regarding species preservation in Costa Rica and Bolivia, and, secondly, find out if the international agreements have precipitated concurrent changes in national conservation policies. While there exists a large and growing literature on international environmental treaty making, little scholarly attention has been devoted to the impact of treaties and their associated organizations on national policies in developing countries. Successful conclusion of this research will shed light on how conservation regimes can work more intentionally to foster cultural value shifts toward regime goals, and how international regimes can use networks of domestic advocacy-oriented experts to facilitate regime goals. The results should make a substantial contribution to the progress of the current research program in the effectiveness of international environmental regimes on state and substate behavior. The work has the potential to make a major advance in our capacity for studying how networks of policy experts and the negotiators of international treaties can affect conditions on the ground in places removed from their direct sovereignty. ***