Complex Global Governance: Actors, Institutions, and Strategies

We have seen a rapid growth in the number and scope of international agreements and organizations governing different areas of world politics. Issues, such as climate change, global health, crisis management, and intellectual property rights, once governed by relatively disconnected international rule sets and organizations, are today subject to overlapping agreements that form institutional complexes. As a result, the creation, design, and effects of individual global governance institutions are fundamentally shaped by how they interact with other institutions. Research on regime complexes has largely focused on intergovernmental agreements and organizations. Studies on informal and transnational governance have mapped an array of institutional forms based on varying mixtures of public and private actors. Both literatures have tended to examine the proliferation of institutional forms in isolation and as a result, variation in overlap and interaction between different types of institutions have remained underexplored. This workshop builds on recent work on institutional complexity in global governance that emphasizes a broader spectrum of actors and institutional forms as constitutive elements of complex global governance systems. It brings together scholars from diverse theoretical and methodological backgrounds interested in better understanding the causes and consequences of institutional complexity and particularly the role of private and other non-state actors and new institutional forms in complex global governance systems. It seeks to advance a new research agenda that 1) explores the roles that non-state actors and transnational and informal forms of cooperation play in institutional complexes; 2) analyzes the drivers and consequences of variation in the features of institutional complexes; 3) examines the link between the features of institutional complexes and the strategies that state and non-state actors choose to navigate these complexes; and 4) investigates the relationship between legitimacy and accountability of global governance institutions under conditions of institutional complexity. First, research on institutional complexity in world affairs has to take into account the full spectrum of actors and institutional forms that constitute today’s global governance. Instead of focusing on intergovernmental agreements, regimes, and organizations, we need to develop a broader conceptual understanding of complex global governance systems that takes into account the changed forms of world politics in the 21st century. Second, research needs to acknowledge that institutional complexes vary both across issue areas and over time and that this variation matters for global governance outcomes. To incorporate this insight in an expanded research program, we need to devise the analytical tools and generate the data necessary to conduct comparative empirical research on the causes and consequences of complex global governance systems. Third, we need more work on the strategic responses of state and non-state actors to institutional complexity. Studies of forum-shopping, regime-shifting, and contested multilateralism provide a fruitful starting point but the link between features of institutional complexes and actors’ strategies to maneuver within them requires more theoretical and empirical work. Finally, the increasing density and overlap of institutional spaces has important implications for the legitimacy and accountability of individual organizations and more work is required to explore these connections.