QuickStart guide to using the IEADB

If you are new to the International Environmental Agreements Database (IEADB), here is a "QuickStart Guide" to ways you can use it in your research. The menus and tabs on the IEADB website are intended to provide multiple, easy ways to find what you are looking for.  Below, however, are an initial set of idea for how you can use over 1,000 environmental agreement entries over 50,000 agreement membership entries to help your research on international environmental law and international environmental politics.

  1. Research on individual agreements (treaties, protocols, and amendments)
  2. Research on individual countries and their membership in agreements
    • By country  -- which agreements is a country a member of?
    • By agreement -- which countries are members of an agreement?
      • Search for agreement, then click Members link which provides 3 views of membership information
        • "Action:" list of dates on which an agreement was signed by, ratified by, or took effect for a country
        • "Wide:" table of membership status of countries in a treaty, including membership count by year (based on entry into force)
        • "Long:" list of status, by year, of each country in an agreement (based on entry into force), for use in statistical analyses
      • Example: Paris Climate Change Agreement
      • Sources for membership data are identified in the heading of membership listings
  3. Other research questions
    • Coding of an initial set of 152 agreements in the IEADB.  These codings have identified paragraphs in each agreement that correspond to particular provisions of each agreement and allow systematic comparison of such provisions across agreements.
    • Literature on an agreement or lineage: These links provide places to start on research related to a given lineage. The ability to update this literature will be made available soon, to allow this literature to be kept more up to date, especially for the more obscure agreement lineages.
    • Secretariats: List of all international organizations that serve as secretariats for one or more of the agreements in the IEADB.
    • Performance Indicators: This provides an initial list of datasets of performance indicators that may be useful in evaluating the behavioral effectiveness of agreements in the IEADB.
  4. Create your own dataset: In the near future, the ability to create a dataset merging agreement metadata, membership data, and country-specific data for indicators from the World Bank, OECD, Polity, and other sources will be added to the IEADB site. The goal is to provide automated (API) access to data from such sites to allow quick merging and downloading of datasets ready for statistical analysis (csv or xls files ready for Stata, SASS, SPSS import).