The Institutional Fragmentation of Global Environmental Governance

• Other Authors: Zelli, Fariborz, van Asselt, Harro
• Format: Text
• Language: English
• Published: Project MUSE 2013
• Subjects: Political Science; environmental governance; global governance; climate governance; fragmentation; institutional analysis; complexity; Biodiversity; Kyoto Protocol; transnationalism; UNFCCC; United Nations; United Nations Environment Programme; arctic; legitimacy; accountability; forest policy; Renewable energy; interplay; institutional theory; Arctic
• Online Access: https://lup.lub.lu.se/record/2374213; https://portal.research.lu.se/files/166994506/Zelli_van_Asselt_glep_a_00180.pdf

One of the core institutional phenomena and challenges in today’s international relations is a growing degree of fragmentation. Ongoing regulation and legalization processes have led to material and functional overlaps between international institutions. As a consequence, “problems of fragmentation arising from the segmentation of governance systems along sectoral lines” have become unavoidable.Institutional research has sought to catch up with this emerging phenomenon, as it has kept pace with previous tides of institutional developments. After a first wave of research on security and trade regimes, and a second wave attending to the further diversification and growing importance of institutions operating in other issue areas, a “third wave” started to break in the mid-1990s, putting stronger emphasis on the increasing complexity and interlinkages among international institutions. This special issue builds on the insights of these growing strands of institutional research, sharing its major starting assumption with them: a thorough understanding and explanation of core aspects of an institution—its genesis, development, compliance pull, fairness, problem-solving effectiveness, etc.—is not possible without taking into account its wider institutional environment.This common ground and the merits of existing scholarly approaches notwithstanding, there are still major gaps in the literature on institutional interlinkages and complexity. Seeking to fill these gaps, this special issue is• scaling up: Compared to research on institutional interlinkages, this special issue focuses on the overall complexity of public and transnational institutions in given issue areas, moving away from a level of analysis that concentrates on overlaps between only two distinct, and mostly public, institutions.• asking different questions: Many studies addressing this overarching level of institutional complexity suffice with a simple stock-taking paired with abstract conceptual approaches, In particular, they attend to the normative ...