ABSTRACT
Chapter 6 moves beyond scholarly debates around compliance at the international level of governance and argues that international environmental law and policy must look more to the journey of implementation of international environmental obligations to domestic levels of governance to discover opportunities to improve compliance and effectiveness. An interactive analysis of the journey of implementation is undertaken of Aichi Target 2 (mainstreaming biodiversity values across government) and Aichi Target 9 (reducing the direct pressure from invasive alien species) from international to domestic levels of governance in the UK. The findings of the analysis uncover an interesting result, that domestic levels of governance offer ways in which some of the hurdles to creating effective international environmental law and policy can be overcome. It argues that domestic levels can (a) strengthen international environmental obligations during implementation, (b) offer important opportunities for socialisation around international environmental law, and (c) strengthen shared understandings around international environmental obligations which feed back to reinforce the interactive nature of international environmental law-making and reinforcement processes.
