Abstract

This article investigates developed countries’ financial and technical assistance commitments under the Stockholm Convention on Persistent Organic Pollutants. It shows that their organization is secured through the establishment of a hybrid implementation network, involving the cooperation of state and transnational actors, and argues that institutional hybridization affects the quality and status of treaty norms. The norms defy a classification into either hard or soft law, but contain elements of both. Institutional and normative hybridization is at once a productive response to the emergence of global risks, and a source of new challenges. The article identifies the diffusion of accountability, the complication of enforcement, and the dilution of the communicative role of international law as challenges flowing from hybridization, and develops three responses: ‘levelling down’, which emphasizes the contractual nature of international agreements; ‘levelling up’, which strengthens state accountability; and ‘governing across’, which constitutionalizes the transnational actors in the implementation network. The advantages and drawbacks of each response are reviewed, and suggestions for reform developed.