From aspiration to regulation in international conservation governance: Comparing the linkages among constitutive and regulative institutional arrangements in four treaty regim

International conservation treaties, like the International Convention on the Regulation of Whaling (ICRW), the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES), the Convention on Migratory Species, and the Convention on Biological Diversity, aim to align policies among their member states to further their respective global conservation aims and goals. However, a gap persists in assessing how well treaty rules support reaching those goals. This research investigates the governance structure of these international conservation treaties to determine the linkages among constitutive rules—the aims, aspirations and parameters within which each treaty regime operates—and the regulative rules which outline the prescribed, prohibited, and permitted actions under which actors operate. Using the Institutional Grammar, I coded the syntax of the constitutive and regulative rules contained within treaty formal policies with a focus on monitoring and enforcement (M&E) mechanisms which are especially important at the international jurisdictional level where they substitute for the lack of an overarching enforcement authority by providing information on actor compliance and system conditions, thus ameliorating the negative effects of uncertainty on member state cooperation. Study findings revealed treaties in which constitutive and regulatory M&E rules were linked both horizontally (at the international jurisdictional level) and vertically (to the national jurisdictional level) were theoretically more likely to reach their conservation objectives. For example, while all four treaties included procedural aspirations in their constitutive rules, CITES effectively utilized its procedural aspirations as policy guidance rule markers to which specific regulative rules were linked. Reporting feedback mechanisms related to monitoring activities were generated in all four forums but only the more regulative regimes—ICRW & CITES—included M&E linkages that reached the national level. This study contributes to a better understanding of the institutional structure and its potential decision-making effect as well as to international conservation governance scholarship.