Governing Regime Complexity: How Do Actors Respond to Norm Collisions Among Global Governance Institutions?

Abstract

Regime complexity creates coordination problems among governance arrangements competing for regulatory primacy and expands the options of state and non-state actors alike to pursue their interests and values. As a result, the question emerges how actors respond to the emergence of regime complexity and the ensuing opportunity to pursue their interests and values not only within, but also across international institutions. International Relations (IR) scholars are therefore increasingly interested in how states, individually and collectively, adapt their behavior to regime complexity. One group of authors has developed a variety of concepts to capture how regime complexity expands actors' options to pursue their parochial interests: Forum-shopping implies that states choose among overlapping institutions in order to bring about a favorable decision in a single issue or question of their interest. Regime-shifting relocates a rule-making process from one international venue to another in order to create an institutional environment which is more conducive to the collective interests of a group of states. Competitive regime creation challenges the governance authority of an existing institution by creating an institutional competitor. Another group of authors departs from the assumption that actors share an interest in functioning governance arrangements and describe various individual and collective efforts to govern regime complexity as "interplay management" (conscious efforts to address and improve institutional interaction and its effects), "orchestration" (enlisting of intermediary actors on a voluntary basis to address target actors in pursuit of governance goals), or mutually complementary processes of institutional adaptation leading to inter-institutional division of labor. This Panel brings together a diverse group of researchers to deepen our theoretical and empirical knowledge on how the various responses of actors to regime complexity affect global governance in various issue-areas. Individual papers conceptualize regime complexes as three dimensional social networks in which states, international organizations (IOs) and private actors struggle for recognition, examine the strategic ordering of regime complexes through indirect governance, study the responses of state actors to "interface conflicts", and address the interaction of the UN with regional security organizations (RSOs). The underlying question that animates all papers is how the responses of various types of actors to regime complexity affect global governance.