Institutions for the Anthropocene

Abstract

The Anthropocene brings with it a new set of policy/governance issues, and so it is justified to ask how the global, regional and local governance systems of today are handling these new challenges. The panel addresses the design and effectiveness of governance systems and their integration across scales and levels. It specifically focuses on the emergence of new institutions and the reshaping of governance architectures in the face of the alarming pace of unprecedented and potentially dangerous global change. These new institutions include not only formal and universal intergovernmental bodies characteristic for the 20th century UN system. Instead, it also includes an increasing number of smaller country clubs and subnational initiatives, but also transnational, often informal, arrangements that blur the distinction between the public and private sector. The reshaping of the present-day global governance architecture, on the other hand, is marked by shifting mandates of international organizations, institutional interactions and overlaps. The degree of these changes has brought some scholars to ask if we are seeing the fragmentation of global governance architectures, and whether or not that fragmentation is beneficial – e.g. increasing responsiveness – or conflictive, thus reducing the system’s effectiveness and fairness. The key questions to be addressed in the panel are: how does the increasing institutional fragmentation of global environmental governance impact on effectiveness and legitimacy? What are the synergistic and what are the detrimental implications? Do we possess the appropriate conceptual apparatus and analytical frameworks to describe and map the institutional complexity of global governance? Which discursive shifts and societal transformations are reflected in this institutional architecture and new evolving coalitions of institutions? How do transnational and informal institutions contribute to governing the Anthropocene? Is the domination of the climate change regime complex visible and what can be its adverse effects on other issue areas?

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