What works

I was reading more stuff on regime complexes tonight and thinking that really all this complicated literature on regimes and treaties and international institutions and organizations boils down to a bunch of people who would really like to be able to say something useful about how to make international cooperation work.

But the problem is that the question of success, of what works, is in itself very complicated. So you get all these fiddly arguments about whether fragmentation is good or not; whether long or short treaty process are good; whether small-n or large-n treaties are good; and so on.

This all misses the point, really. The question is when is a fragmented process successful? When is a long treaty process good vs. a short treaty process? When is it useful to have larger or smaller groups of players?