What role for soft law in building and developing the climate change regime?

Summary, in English

This paper aims to portray the increasingly complex normative structure of international climate change regime, which consists of the 1992 UN Framework Convention on Cimate Change, the 1997 Kyoto Protocol as well as other additional elements that playing a role, such as the practices of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and the Global Environmental Facility and procedures of these institutions. The paper is composed of three parts. The first part defines three key concepts, used extensively in this paper. Part two discusses factors promoting the increasing use of soft law in international environmental management in general and climate change regime in particular and overviews the international legal foundations on which the climate change regime is built. Part three briefly analysis of the norm
structure of the CCR, including the reporting, review and non-compliance mechanisms as well as the fJexibility mechanisms that this regime lays down. The paper concludes that both hard and soft law, may have diffirential efficts on both rule development and effictive implementation of climate change rules depending mainly on three factors: 'political saliency', 'the perceived state of scientific knowledge', and 'the bargaining power of the states' that favour either hard or respectively soft law.