Oran R Young
Biographic Data
| ID | 113334 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Oran R Young |
| GIVEN NAMES | Oran R |
| FAMILY NAME | Young |
| SIGNATURE | YOUNG O R |
| AFFILIATIONS | Center of International Studies, Princeton University |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 69 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 1033 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 66 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 3 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1967 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2022 |
| H-INDEX | 17 |
Building Common Interests in the Arctic Ocean with Global Inclusion: Volume 2
The state and challenges of Arctic governance in an era of transformation
International Cooperation: Building Regimes for Natural Resources and the Environment
Governing Arctic Seas: Regional Lessons from the Bering Strait and Barents Sea
Baseline of Russian Arctic Laws
International Governance: Protecting the Environment in a Stateless Society
How can the global environment be safeguarded in the absence of a world government? In the vanguard of efforts to address this critical question, Oran R. Young draws on environmental issues to explore the nature of international governance. Young's analysis invokes the distinction between "governance," a social function involving the management of interdependent individuals or groups, and "government," a set of formal organizations that makes and…
Governing Complex Systems: Social Capital for the Anthropocene
Governing for sustainability in a world of complex systems will require new social capital in the form of innovative steering mechanisms that differ in important respects from those familiar to us from past experience. Complex systems feature high levels of connectivity, nonlinear dynamics, directional change, and emergent properties. Creating effective governance arrangements in such settings calls for an ability to combine the durability requir…
Facets of Arctic Change
International audience
Governing the antipodes: International cooperation in Antarctica and the Arctic
The Arctic and the Antarctic appear to be polar opposites with regard to many matters, including the systems of governance that have evolved in the two regions. Antarctica is demilitarised, closed to economic development, open to a wide range of scientific activities, and subject to strict environmental regulations under the terms of the legally binding Antarctic Treaty of 1959 along with several supplementary measures that together form the Anta…
The indecisive role of the market in China's SO2and COD emissions trading
Governmental intervention is essential to combat environmental pollution, a phenomenon classically explained as market failure, while market-based environmental policy instruments have provided cost-effective alternatives. By examining five pilot air pollution (sulfur dioxide) and water pollution (chemical oxygen demand) trading schemes in China through a market-based theoretical framework and extensive empirical analysis, this research analyzes …
The Perils of Odysseus: On Constructing Theories of International Relations
Asian Countries and the Arctic Future
Arctic Governance Arctic Council Cooperation and Conflict High North Economic Prospects Shipping Living Resources Fishing Continental Shelf Mineral Extraction Mining China India Japan Singapore South Korea Climate Change Ice Melting
Connectivité et gouvernance des systèmes socio-écologiques multiniveaux: Le rôle du capital social
Cet article étudie les défis rencontrés par la gouvernance environnementale sous l’effet combiné de la connectivité accrue des systèmes d’exploitation des ressources et des interdépendances fonctionnelles croissantes des systèmes socio-écologiques. Nous nous pencherons sur l’exemple du Parc indigène du Xingu (PIX) au Brésil et de sa région agro-industrielle environnante, avant d’élargir notre examen à la littérature consacrée à la gouvernance des…
Governance for the Environment: New Perspectives
Arctic Tipping Points: Governance in Turbulent Times
The International Human Dimensions Programme on Global Environmental Change – Taking Stock and Moving Forward
Effectiveness of international environmental regimes: Existing knowledge, cutting-edge themes, and research strategies
International environmental regimes—especially those regimes articulated in multilateral environmental agreements—have been a subject of intense interest within the scientific community over the last three decades. However, there are substantial differences of opinion regarding the effectiveness of these governance systems or the degree to which they are successful in solving the problems leading to their creation. This article provides a critica…
If an Arctic Ocean treaty is not the solution, what is the alternative
Many analysts argue that responding effectively to the transformative changes occurring in the Arctic will require the creation of an Arctic Ocean treaty or even a more comprehensive treaty covering the whole Arctic. This article explores this line of thinking critically. In doing so, it addresses three distinct but related questions: 1) Is there a need for an Arctic Ocean framework agreement? 2) Where should we focus our attention along the inte…
The future of the Arctic: Cauldron of Conflict or Zone of Peace
The forces of climate change and globalization are transforming the Arctic, tightening the links between this seemingly remote region and the world at large with regard to matters of environmental protection, sustainable development, and the pursuit of peace. This has triggered an explosion of both popular and scholarly interest in the far north. Much of the resultant literature is marked by persistent expectations that the Arctic will become the…
Connectivity and the Governance of Multilevel Social-Ecological Systems: The Role of Social Capital
We discuss the challenges confronting environmental governance caused by the increasing connectivity of resource-use systems and the growing functional interdependencies of ecological and social systems. We take as a point of departure the case of the Xingu Indigenous Park (PIX) in Brazil and its surrounding agro-industrial region. This case provides a basis for reviewing the literature on resource governance, including both points of consensus a…
Introduction: New perspectives on governahnce for sustainable development
We live in an era in which the demand for governance arising from human–environment interactions or, more broadly, the quest for sustainable development is growing, while confidence in the capacity of government – the conventional mechanism for handling such matters – to address problems of governance is waning. What are the sources of this paradox? What can we do to address the rising demand for governance under these circumstances? How can we e…
Whither the Arctic? Conflict or cooperation in the circumpolar north
Biophysical changes underway in the Arctic have stirred a remarkable surge of interest and concern in many quarters, including non-Arctic states and non-state actors. This article explores the implications of these developments for the pursuit of governance in the region. Many reactions to this situation are more alarmist than alarming. But recent developments do provide an excellent opportunity to reassess the effectiveness of existing arrangeme…
Whither the Arctic 2009? Further developments
This note updates the author's paper with the title ‘Whither the Arctic? Conflict or cooperation in the circumpolar north’. published in the last issue of this journal (Young 2009). Particular attention is paid to the policy issues arising from the ongoing and rapid changes unfolding in the Arctic
Evaluating Functional Fit between a Set of Institutions and an Ecosystem
This paper presents a quantitative analytical method for measuring functional fit between a specific ecosystem and a defined set of institutions. Functional misfits, the focus of this paper, can arise as a result of gaps in governance-a lack of institutional provision for a socioecological system component or link. The method measures such misfit using a similarity metric (simple matching). This provides an indication of the potential degree of s…
Analyzing International Environmental Regimes: From Case Study to Database
Regime theory has become an increasingly influential approach to the analysis of international relations, particularly in the areas of international political economy and international environmental politics. The conceptual appeal of the idea of "governance without government"—in which a combination of different organizations and institutions supply governance to address specific problems—reflects a world in which the demand for governance is gre…
Political leadership and regime formation: On the Development of Institutions in International Society
Leadership plays a critical but poorly understood role in determining the success or failure of the processes of institutional bargaining that dominate efforts to form international regimes or, more generally, institutional arrangements in international society. An examination of the nature of institutional bargaining serves as a springboard both for pinpointing the role of leadership in regime formation and for differentiating three forms of lea…
The politics of international regime formation: Managing Natural Resources and the Environment
Why do actors in international society succeed in forming institutional arrangements or regimes to cope with some transboundary problems but fail to do so in connection with other, seemingly similar, problems? This article employs a threefold strategy to make progress toward answering this question. The first section prepares the ground by identifying and critiquing the principal models embedded in the existing literature on regime formation, and…
Regime dynamics: The Rise and Fall of International Regimes
The dynamics of international regimes are treated as social institutions. How and why do regimes arise from the interactions of individual actors over time? Three developmental sequences are identified, and the resultant regimes are described as spontaneous orders, negotiated orders, and imposed orders. How do regimes change once they have become established in specific social settings? Three major types of pressure for regime change arise from i…
International Governance: Protecting the Environment in a Stateless Society
How can the global environment be safeguarded in the absence of a world government? In the vanguard of efforts to address this critical question, Oran R. Young draws on environmental issues to explore the nature of international governance. Young's analysis invokes the distinction between "governance," a social function involving the management of interdependent individuals or groups, and "government," a set of formal organizations that makes and…
International Regimes: Toward a New Theory of Institutions
The current burst of work on regimes or, more broadly, on international institutions, reflects an emerging sense—especially among Americans—that the international order engineered by the United States and its allies in the aftermath of World War II is eroding rapidly and may even be on the verge of collapse. But is the resultant surge of scholarly work on international regimes any more likely to yield lasting contributions to knowledge than have …
International Regimes: Problems of Concept Formation
Although we live in a world of international regimes, the scholarly literature on them remains rudimentary, especially in analytic terms. This essay examines the proposition that all international regimes are social institutions, even though there is great variation among them. Among other things, this suggests that regimes are dependent upon the maintenance of convergent expectations among actors; formalization is not a necessary condition for t…
Interdependencies in World Politics
This essay explores the phenomenon of interdependence in world systems1 from three separate perspectives. To begin, it attempts to pin down and clarify the concept interdependence. Secondly, it assesses the debate on the factual question of whether the level of interdependence is rising or falling in the contemporary world system. Finally, it offers a number of hypotheses dealing with the links between systemic interdependencies (as an independen…
Discussions and Reviews: Intermediaries: additional thoughts on third parties
The Study of International Regimes
The article surveys the literature on international `regimes'. Regimes are social institutions that influence the behavior of states and their subjects. They consist of informal and formalized principles and norms, as well as specific rules, procedures and programs. The term is explicitly broad and captures the unwritten understandings and relationships, as well as the formal legal agreements, that influence how states and individuals behave in a…
Political Discontinuities in the International System
The international political system is currently undergoing changes that are both rapid and extensive. Especially since the early sixties, a number of trends have manifested themselves and become interrelated in such a way that, taken together, they are substantially altering the fundamental postwar patterns of international politics. These indications of change and flux have engendered a substantial debate concerning appropriate concepts for the …
Polar politics: Creating International Environmental Regimes
The Problem of Scale in Human/Environment Relationships
This essay seeks to initiate a discussion of the problem of scale among social scientists. Long familiar to natural scientists, the problem of scale centers on the transferability of propositions from one level to another in the dimensions of space and time. As a means of pursuing this goal, the essay examines similarities and differences between studies of micro-level institutions (common-pool resource [CPR] arrangements) and macro-level institu…
A Test of Downsian Voter Rationality: 1964 Presidential Voting
Systematic testing of Downsian voter rationality is accomplished using a computer simulation technique on the 1964 SRC voting survey. The simulation tests both the hypotheses predicting whether an individual will vote and for whom an individual will vote. To evaluate the results of the tests we develop a statistic analogous to Pearson's r. This statistic measures the percentage improvement over a random guess technique. Utilizing this statistic, …
Evaluating Functional Fit between a Set of Institutions and an Ecosystem
This paper presents a quantitative analytical method for measuring functional fit between a specific ecosystem and a defined set of institutions. Functional misfits, the focus of this paper, can arise as a result of gaps in governance-a lack of institutional provision for a socioecological system component or link. The method measures such misfit using a similarity metric (simple matching). This provides an indication of the potential degree of s…
Compliance and Public Authority: A Theory with International Applications
Anarchy and Social Choice: Reflections on the International Polity
The concept “social choice” provides a means of injecting new life into systemic analyses of the international polity. Bargaining, organized warfare, and coercive diplomacy are the most important mechanisms of social choice in the international polity. Third-party settlement is of lesser importance, though not irrelevant. Each of these mechanisms is evaluated in terms of criteria such as decisiveness, efficiency, justice, and the production of ex…
Professor Russett: Industrious Tailor to a Naked Emperor
Professor Bruce Russett has recently produced a book that purports to demonstrate the potentialities of the new “science” of international relations. A careful reading of International Regions and the International System, however, makes it difficult to avoid being impressed by the essential futility of the exercise and, therefore, to escape the conclusion that the book does not direct our attention toward an important new source of knowledge and…
Whither the Arctic? Conflict or cooperation in the circumpolar north
Biophysical changes underway in the Arctic have stirred a remarkable surge of interest and concern in many quarters, including non-Arctic states and non-state actors. This article explores the implications of these developments for the pursuit of governance in the region. Many reactions to this situation are more alarmist than alarming. But recent developments do provide an excellent opportunity to reassess the effectiveness of existing arrangeme…
The United Nations and the International System
A notable gap in existing analyses of the United Nations is the relative absence of systematic treatments of the links between the Organization itself and the international system in which it operates. These links constitute a complex dual relationship, both sides of which are worthy of serious analyses. The functions and activities of the United Nations are molded by the fundamental dimensions and dynamic processes of the international system. A…
A Portfolio Approach to Analyzing Complex Human-Environment Interactions: Institutions and Land Change
Young, O. R., E. F. Lambin, F. Alcock, H. Haberl, S. I. Karlsson, W. J. McConnell, T. Myint, C. Pahl-Wostl, C. Polsky, P. Ramakrishnan, H. Schroeder, M. Scouvart, and P. H. Verburg. 2006. A portfolio approach to analyzing complex human-environment interactions: institutions and land change. Ecology and Society 11(2): 31. https://doi.org/10.5751/ES-01799-110231
The Perils of Odysseus: On Constructing Theories of International Relations
Confusion and misconceptions about the state and nature of “theory” have reached monumental proportions in the field of international relations. This situation is debilitating both because it misleads academics and policymakers alike about the contributions that can be made by theorists of international relations and because it operates to set back serious efforts to pursue theory in the field. Accordingly, I write in an effort to cut through som…
The Age of the Arctic
Quietly, and almost unbeknownst to the general public, the Arctic has emerged during the 1980s as a strategic arena of vital significance to both of the superpowers. As recently as the Fall 1981 issue of Foreign Affairs, the political scientist Lincoln Bloomfield of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology could present a comparatively benign view of the Arctic, arguing that the region was free of major international conflicts. Thus, he suggeste…
The Intermediaries: Third Parties in International Crises
Yearbook of International Cooperation on Environment and Development 2003/2004
The Behavioral Effects of Environmental Regimes: Collective-Action vs. Social-Practice Models
The Intermediaries: Third Parties in International Crises
The possibilities for third-party intervention aimed at facilitating the non-violent termination of international crises are explored in this book. The author develops a theory of third-party intervention at a high level of abstraction and then presents a set of applications which focuses on the Secretary-General of the United Nations and a variety of potential Soviet-American crises. Originally published in 1967. The Princeton Legacy Library use…
Intermediaries and Interventionists: Third Parties in the Middle East Crisis
Political Discontinuities in the International System
The international political system is currently undergoing changes that are both rapid and extensive. Especially since the early sixties, a number of trends have manifested themselves and become interrelated in such a way that, taken together, they are substantially altering the fundamental postwar patterns of international politics. These indications of change and flux have engendered a substantial debate concerning appropriate concepts for the …
The United Nations and the International System
A notable gap in existing analyses of the United Nations is the relative absence of systematic treatments of the links between the Organization itself and the international system in which it operates. These links constitute a complex dual relationship, both sides of which are worthy of serious analyses. The functions and activities of the United Nations are molded by the fundamental dimensions and dynamic processes of the international system. A…
The Intermediaries: Third Parties in International Crises
Neutralization and World Politics
Professor Russett: Industrious Tailor to a Naked Emperor
Professor Bruce Russett has recently produced a book that purports to demonstrate the potentialities of the new “science” of international relations. A careful reading of International Regions and the International System, however, makes it difficult to avoid being impressed by the essential futility of the exercise and, therefore, to escape the conclusion that the book does not direct our attention toward an important new source of knowledge and…
Interdependencies in World Politics
This essay explores the phenomenon of interdependence in world systems1 from three separate perspectives. To begin, it attempts to pin down and clarify the concept interdependence. Secondly, it assesses the debate on the factual question of whether the level of interdependence is rising or falling in the contemporary world system. Finally, it offers a number of hypotheses dealing with the links between systemic interdependencies (as an independen…
Political Leadership and Collective Goods
Discussions and Reviews: Intermediaries: additional thoughts on third parties
International Law and Social Science: The Contributions of Myres S. McDougal
It is widely agreed that Professor McDougal's impressive intellectual achievements can be traced, in part, to his efforts to expand the use of concepts and conclusions from the social sciences in the analysis of legal issues, especially in the realm of international law. Nevertheless, his concern with the links between the development of a policy-oriented jurisprudence on the one hand and the use of findings from the social sciences in legal anal…
The Perils of Odysseus: On Constructing Theories of International Relations
Confusion and misconceptions about the state and nature of “theory” have reached monumental proportions in the field of international relations. This situation is debilitating both because it misleads academics and policymakers alike about the contributions that can be made by theorists of international relations and because it operates to set back serious efforts to pursue theory in the field. Accordingly, I write in an effort to cut through som…
Bargaining: Formal Theories of Negotiation
Regimes for the Ocean, Outer Space, and Weather
The allocation of resources among users of the oceans, outer space and the weather is discussed. Attention is given to the international management of maritime navigation, the control of fisheries, offshore oil and gas exploitation, mineral exploitation in the deep seabed (especially the mining of manganese nodules), and the regulation of oceanographic studies. The management of outer space is considered, with special reference to remote sensing …
Anarchy and Social Choice: Reflections on the International Polity
The concept “social choice” provides a means of injecting new life into systemic analyses of the international polity. Bargaining, organized warfare, and coercive diplomacy are the most important mechanisms of social choice in the international polity. Third-party settlement is of lesser importance, though not irrelevant. Each of these mechanisms is evaluated in terms of criteria such as decisiveness, efficiency, justice, and the production of ex…
A Test of Downsian Voter Rationality: 1964 Presidential Voting
Systematic testing of Downsian voter rationality is accomplished using a computer simulation technique on the 1964 SRC voting survey. The simulation tests both the hypotheses predicting whether an individual will vote and for whom an individual will vote. To evaluate the results of the tests we develop a statistic analogous to Pearson's r. This statistic measures the percentage improvement over a random guess technique. Utilizing this statistic, …
International Regimes: Problems of Concept Formation
Although we live in a world of international regimes, the scholarly literature on them remains rudimentary, especially in analytic terms. This essay examines the proposition that all international regimes are social institutions, even though there is great variation among them. Among other things, this suggests that regimes are dependent upon the maintenance of convergent expectations among actors; formalization is not a necessary condition for t…
The political economy of the Northern Fur Seal
The commercial harvest of Northern Fur Seals ( Callorhinus ursinus )breeding on the Pribilof Islands in the Bering Sea has gone on with few interruptions for almost 200 years. Since 1910 this harvest has been carried out exclusively by the US federal government acting as an operating authority. At the same time the management of all Northern Fur Seals, those associated with Ostrov Tyuleniy [Robben Island] and Komandorskiye Ostrova [Commander Isla…
Compliance and Public Authority: A Theory with International Applications
The Center for Northern Studies
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Regime dynamics: The Rise and Fall of International Regimes
The dynamics of international regimes are treated as social institutions. How and why do regimes arise from the interactions of individual actors over time? Three developmental sequences are identified, and the resultant regimes are described as spontaneous orders, negotiated orders, and imposed orders. How do regimes change once they have become established in specific social settings? Three major types of pressure for regime change arise from i…
The Age of the Arctic
Quietly, and almost unbeknownst to the general public, the Arctic has emerged during the 1980s as a strategic arena of vital significance to both of the superpowers. As recently as the Fall 1981 issue of Foreign Affairs, the political scientist Lincoln Bloomfield of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology could present a comparatively benign view of the Arctic, arguing that the region was free of major international conflicts. Thus, he suggeste…
International Regimes: Toward a New Theory of Institutions
The current burst of work on regimes or, more broadly, on international institutions, reflects an emerging sense—especially among Americans—that the international order engineered by the United States and its allies in the aftermath of World War II is eroding rapidly and may even be on the verge of collapse. But is the resultant surge of scholarly work on international regimes any more likely to yield lasting contributions to knowledge than have …
The Pribilof Islands: A View from the Periphery
Seventy-three years of federal administration of the Pribi lof Islands came to an abrupt end in October 1983 when the U.S. Congress voted to terminate the mandate of the Pribilof Islands Pro gram. To ease the ensuing transition to home rule, the U.S. Congress established a $20 million Pribilof Islands Trust. Yet reasonable esti mates indicate that most of this money will go to improve the infra structure of the islands and to rehabilitate the agi…
The politics of international regime formation: Managing Natural Resources and the Environment
Why do actors in international society succeed in forming institutional arrangements or regimes to cope with some transboundary problems but fail to do so in connection with other, seemingly similar, problems? This article employs a threefold strategy to make progress toward answering this question. The first section prepares the ground by identifying and critiquing the principal models embedded in the existing literature on regime formation, and…
Political science (55 works) · Economics (28 works) · Law (28 works) · Geography (24 works) · Business (22 works) · Politics (22 works) · Sociology (21 works) · Law (20 works) · Arctic and Russian Policy Studies (19 works) · International Relations and Foreign Policy (16 works)