Conserving What’s Left: The International Environmental Regime and Subnational Resistance to Cooperation

Abstract A long-running debate in the international relations literature is whether international agreements are effective at producing domestic policy change. Much of this research focuses on national-level indicators of policy and the domestic political interests that are thought to influence it. However, there can be wide subnational variation in both policy changes and the strength of countervailing pressures. I apply this framework to protected areas, a key policy response to the biodiversity and climate crises that has significant distributive consequences over land use. Using an original geospatial dataset on 846 ecoregions worldwide 1992–2020 combined with novel measures of anti-protection interests, I find that when a country becomes more deeply embedded in the international environmental regime, it is more likely to protect more land. Local economic pressures, however, shape where this protection occurs. This subnational framework helps synthesize findings in the literature and deepens our understanding of a critical area of environmental and land use politics.