Systemic Substitution Asymmetry and Infrastructural Lock-In

International PolicyEnvironmental Governance

Written for Brown's Watson School under Dr. Jennifer Hadden, this paper compares two international environmental regimes that share nearly identical structures; both address pollutants that cross borders, both rely on near-universal country participation, yet one has driven the near-total elimination of its target chemicals while the other continues to fall short of its goals.

The paper argues that existing scholarship overweights institutional design (how treaties are written, how compliance is enforced) and underweights a more basic material question: whether affordable substitute technologies actually exist at the scale a treaty demands. Where clean substitutes are commercially viable, treaties succeed quickly; where they aren't, even well-designed agreements stall against the limits of what industry can deliver.

Interest-based matrix

Cheap substitutes moved the U.S. from intermediate to pusher on ozone; on climate, no competitive substitute, no move

Ecological vulnerability

Pushers

demand ambitious rules

Intermediates

see the threat, lack resources or will

Bystanders

Draggers

resist binding deals

Ozone: U.S. & chemical industry, once CFC substitutes cut abatement costs

Climate: major emitters, with no substitute yet matching coal, oil and gas on price

lowAbatement costshigh

>98%

of ozone-depleting substances cut under the Montreal Protocol

2.4–2.8°C

warming by 2100 on current Paris pledges, against a 1.5°C limit

Matrix from Sprinz and Vaahtoranta (1994), as applied in the paper. Placements are the paper’s: CFC substitutes lowered abatement costs for the United States and its chemical industry, “shifting both from the Intermediate to the Pusher category”; the lack of substitutes “kept major emitters in the Intermediate or Dragger categories.”