ORGANIZATION Finally, monitoring activities differ in the organizational modalities of their implementation. With regard to behaviour monitoring, where self-declaration is the norm, the series of organisational agreements depends on the prerogatives of the State. One of the biggest obstacles in several cases, in particular for the ALPH, was the absence and/or incompatibility of national emission statistics due to the very different national capacities for collecting and reporting data required for the international regime. None of the cases where national reports are used have a perfect record; Countries often do not reject falsified reports or provide incomplete or low-quality reports (19). This is largely due to the lack of national organizational capacity to produce such reports. Such misconduct is intentional; In the 1960s, Panama did not submit whaling reports to the IWC, although it could have done so because Panama`s only whaling vessel was involved in a flagrant quota violation. National collection and reporting is not the only source of information. The Whaling Statistics Bureau and ICES, as mentioned earlier, are the main data sources for whaling and fishing agreements and are supported not only by Member States but also by industry. In only one case, the IWC`s international compliance system, a new organizational capacity was put in place, explicitly put in place to assess the accuracy of self-reporting, and in this case, the program was very small and funded on a bilateral basis by the parties. Theoretical studies on games of international cooperation also point out that repeated games over time lead to more successful collaboration than static games (92). This is true if compliance is transparent: the willingness to cooperate more fully and effectively will increase if the parties can have confidence that all other parties have complied with previous agreements. This highlights two interconnected predictions: First, parties seeking to improve cooperation over time will seek review procedures so that compliance is transparent. Second, in cases where compliance is transparent, trust should increase over time, accompanied by enhanced cooperation.
None of these predictions are rigorously supported by the cases. In the case of the IWC`s system of international observers, the original proposal was aimed precisely at improving the transparency of compliance. However, it took 18 years for IOS to be introduced. This indicates that the parties have not requested a review with much vigour. 7 As for the second prediction, there is not much evidence that the IOS, when it finally came into force, led to more trust and wider cooperation. The severity of IWC regulations has increased from the early 1970s to the present day, but not because of IOS. In the case of the EPLT, transparency of compliance may have resulted in parties not adhering to substantive protocols instead of cooperating more widely and risking the risk of non-compliance. Monitoring and verification were not important aspects in most international environmental issues. Neither at the international nor at the national level, large organizational infrastructures have been created to fulfil these functions. Most official information gatherings between regimes are reported by existing national organizations themselves, although NGOs and other actors monitor and contribute to the effectiveness of regimes to some extent. Although compliance with the agreements appears to be high, the heavy reliance on national reports, which are incomplete and may be inaccurate due to conflicts of interest, makes it difficult to carry out a true conformity assessment. In addition, the degree of compliance depends crucially on the nature and severity of the standard.
Therefore, it is important to consider not only compliance, but also whether standards are set at appropriate levels. Since international organizations have neither the power nor the capacity to monitor and enforce standards, we propose for the time being that the most effective standards should be those that allow for unilateral action, whether by the parties to the agreement or by other actors such as NGOs. INFORMAL ACTORS The practice of monitoring and verification takes place through many channels, not just through States and organizations formally linked to an international agreement. For example, it is now common for NGOs to claim an important role in the implementation of international agreements by collecting and publishing information on compliance and pressuring states to control pollution. .