The Legal Normative Overlap of Environmental Agreements

Without a central authority or overarching international institution, environmental regimes and institutions have evolved independently and in a fragmented way. Although some debates exist regarding legal overlap on specific subject matters within international law, no study carried out or proposed legal taxonomy or criteria to identify the sources of legal overlap and conflicts within environmental law. This research aims to elucidate the types of overlap by providing an argument to recognize how such overlaps arise within environmental appliances, and it identifies both states and international institutions as the main sources of legal conflict within the environmental framework. These findings contribute to recognizing the barriers that hinder conflict resolution and to proposing practical solutions for managing legal conflicts. This study can assist policy-makers in enhancing the effectiveness of environmental legal instruments by refining the text to avoid contradictions within Multilateral Environmental Agreements (MEAs) during the negotiation phase. Accordingly, the study and its findings aim to address existing gaps in the environmental legal system, particularly concerning the issue of congested rules. This can be achieved by adopting the criteria and basis of overlap proposed in this study and applying them to address the extensive fragmentation across environmental fields. Ultimately, this research provides a legal method to foster synergies and offers recommendations for managing overlaps within congested MEAs.