Political science Associate Professor Ronald Mitchell’s ninth-floor office in PLC could be called a repository for environmental treaties research. Ten years of work sits in stacks of binders and in books along the wall, forming a listing of international environmental agreements larger than that of the United Nations.
In September, Mitchell was awarded a $282,000 grant from the “Decision, Risk, and Management Science program” of The National Science Foundation to continue his work of creating a comprehensive database of international environmental agreements and their effectiveness.
“The project eventually will identify which treaties rely on sanctions and which rely on rewards to assess whether rewards or sanctions are a more effective way of inducing behaviors that are less environmentally harmful,” he said.
An earlier version of the database has already been used in University political science and environmental studies classes, and six students are currently working on the project, which Mitchell said will eventually include approximately 2,500 environmental agreements.
Mitchell said an important aspect of the research is analyzing how effective environmental agreements are in changing the behavior of governments, corporations and individuals. He said the database is needed to protect against pollution because countries tend to do what suits their individual interests.
“There is no world government to tell countries what to do,” he said. “It will provide improved evaluated guidelines for policy makers.”
Junior political science and economics major Ryan Slunaker has worked on the project for about two years and said he uses his database coding experiences to learn more about political science research.
“The grant is a great thing,” he said. “This research hasn’t really even been attempted before and will be very beneficial when it is completed.”
Mitchell also has received support for the project from the University’s Summer Research Award program and the American Philosophical Society’s Sabbatical Fellowship program. He said the grant-enabled research will have a positive affect on the University’s interest in international issues.
“(The project) will say that the UO is doing international research and that the UO is committed to environmental studies and to students,” he said. “There are really smart students here doing really good research.”
The international environmental agreements database and more information about the project are available online at http://www.uoregon.edu/~rmitchel/iea/.