Soft Law & Partnerships

International comity between nations is generally expressed in two types of international instruments: legally binding agreements or treaties embodying legal obligations, and political and aspirational commitments that take the form of Declarations, Partnerships, Action Plans, Accords, U.N. Resolutions and Principles. As once described by Prime Minister Harold Wilson, these are 'political undertakings' as distinct from legally binding agreements.

The corpus of political and aspirational instruments is growing rapidly. This aspect of the ISEA project will systematically assess the actual and potential impact of these instruments on the global development and deployment of energy efficiency and renewable energy technologies. The ISEA Soft Law and Partnerships Project will provide a comprehensive knowledge base for stakeholders ranging from policy- and law-makers to inquiring citizens on the extent to which partnerships and other legally non-binding international instruments (often referred to as 'soft law') facilitate the development and deployment of energy efficiency and renewable energy.

These instruments include, for example, the 1972 Stockholm Declaration on the Human Environment; Agenda 21; the Rio Declaration on Environment and Development; the International Action Programme and Political Declaration that resulted from the 2004 International Conference for Renewable Energies in Bonn, Germany; the political statement on climate change, clean energy and sustainable development of the recent 2005 G8 Summit in Gleneagles, Scotland; a plethora of U.N. General Assembly resolutions; and the Asia-Pacific Partnership on Clean Development and Climate.

These political and aspirational undertakings possess immense potential to accelerate the use of renewable energy and energy efficiency technologies throughout the developed and developing world. To date, however, there has been no comprehensive, systematic study that catalogues, analyzes or measures the impact of these political commitments. The instant project will remedy this deficit by comprehensively cataloguing, analyzing and then evaluating the technological, socio-political and economic impacts of soft law instruments on energy efficiency and renewable energy. This information will be incorporated into the ISEA database. This will enlarge the ISEA database to provide a truly comprehensive assessment of how the international community is responding to the development and commercial deployment of REES.

The principal activities of this project will be as follows: