Regime design matters. International treaties and regimes have value if and only if they cause people to do things they would not otherwise do. [Whether] a treaty elicits compliance or other desired behavioral changes depends upon identifiable characteristics of the regime's compliance systems. As negotiators incorporate certain rules into a regime and exclude others, they are making choices that have crucial implications for whether or not actors will comply.

For decades, nations have negotiated treaties with simultaneous hope that those treaties would produce better collective outcomes and skepticism about the ability to influence the way governments or individuals act. Both lawyers and political scientists have theorized about how international legal regimes can influence behavior and why they often do not.