Progressive vs. gridlocked treaties

I've realized I need a set of concepts that I haven't seen defined yet: on-going treaties, and their two sub-categories: let's call them progressive on-going treaties and gridlocked on-going treaties.

What I mean by this is that some "treaties" aren't so much treaties as they are multi-year processes, on-going efforts at managing some problem toward a solution or just toward on-going control of the problem. These processes occur because something about the nature of the issue area requires an on-going process. There are several reasons why this could happen: perhaps because the problem is an inherently chronic one that requires long-term management; perhaps because the problem to be solved is not fully understood and requires a process of discovery; perhaps because the solutions needed to solve the problem require development over time. But probably the most important reason these crop up is that a full solution is not politically possible at the outset and requires multiple rounds, perhaps with ratcheting up of the strength of multilateral action over time.

Sometimes these multi-year processes are going well and producing additional pay-offs in each round. An example of this is the process surrounding ozone-depleting substances: in this process, multiple meetings over time led to progressive ratcheting down of ODS emissions. Each round tended to produce further progress.

But sometimes these multi-year processes get gridlocked; they go round and round in circles, or each round of negotiation shipwrecks on the same set of problems that plagued the last one; or gains prove fleeting, with gains made in one round followed by slacking off rather than effective ratcheting up. The climate negotiation process seems to be an example of this. It gets called out constantly for all these problems.

People talk about gridlock specifically in the climate negotiations, but I haven't actually seen someone use this idea that negotiations can be an on-going management process and that that PROCESS can be progressive or gridlocked. But it's a different concept of success that is focused less on whether things are moving toward a successful end goal and more on whether the treaty is healthy in process and is producing an on-going series of gains.

The answer might be in the regime literature; climate negotiations might want to produce a "treaty", but the process of on-going institutionalized negotiation with intermediate goals might better be understood as an on-going regime. But I think that literature misses this point in other ways. Regime research gets the "on-going" part, but doesn't necessarily start from the same assumption of movement toward attainment of a goal or ever-increasing level of management of a problem. Regimes do change over time, but it isn't their goal to change over time, the way it is the goal of a negotiation process. Treaty-making is still about creating rules; regimes typically assume the rules have (largely) been created, though they may be added to.