My presentation on Efficacy of International Environmental Law
Legal Research, Law and Policy ·A foray into the study of compliance mechanisms within environmental laws
I began studying “compliance mechanisms” within environmental laws during my PGDEL dissertation shared in a previous blog post here.
During my presentation at NLSIU, Bengaluru, I was recommended to publish this in parts and with specific focus on an industry or sector of laws.
Even so, I recently came across FOSS softwares for Content Analysis, including the highly capable and yet, free, Qualcoder.
My experience with using Qualcoder for Content Analysis
I decided to use Qualcoder with the aim to analyse a large swathe of decisions in little time. Although I did this with the expectation that there would be a space to apply Regex in a simple manner, I was not disappointed with the user interface for marking codes.
The software allows you to conduct frequency and relational analysis with ease if you can code an internally consistent set of codes. I say this because during proximity analysis, which I found to be particularly challenging, you have to study the distance between two meaning units using the data analysis which is represented in a table, and with results such as the average and standard deviation.
However, to study each code’s occurrance separately would prove ineficient if not for internal consistency amongst your codes, theoretically (as it should be in a content analysis). The distance between varying meaning units will not imply anything unless there is a theoretical grounding for the selected codes to deduce from.
Hence, I worked with the theoretical understanding of compliance mechanisms from the point of view of Philippe Sands’ categorisation for difference amongst state and international obligations, along with that devised by Harold K. Jacobson and Edith Brown Weiss for difference in procedural and substantive obligations.
Similarly, to deduce from a large data table becomes tedious unless you have marked specific meaning units with their ctid’s (not currently defined in the Qualcoder manual), to analyse the relation between those specific ctids.
It also lets you visualise using a graph generator, through which I could generate links, which I hopefully plan to publish in a more substantially researched paper later.
One of the pie charts I generated is this pie chart for breakup of codes in all categories 
Looking for collaborators
If you want to collaborate on this topic, you can send me an email or LinkedIn connect request with a note (details on Home page)