ABSTRACT
The United Nations Environment Programme has identified over 500 agreements in existence relating to environmental protection issues. Delivery on multilateral environmental agreement (MEA) commitments has been far less forthcoming, with several state parties often having poor or mediocre track records on implementing international environmental treaty obligations. The pre-eminent status of the nation state as actors of international relations raises significant challenges in relation to any attempt to establish international agreement over environmental problems. Since the 1992 UN Conference on Environment and Development in Rio the international community has been mindful of the significance of the issue of international environmental law (IEL) implementation and the need to achieve better rates of compliance with MEA commitments. Making the writ of IEL run' by virtue of the deployment of international systems and measures designed to enhance enforcement, regrettably still remains a relatively rare as opposed to a standard occurrence. The chapter also presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in this book.
