In recent years, significant progress has been made in scrutinizing an emerging phenomenon of global environmental governance: the institutional complexity or fragmentation of different issue areas. This institutional complexity matters: the influx of hybrid and transnational regimes alters the institutional centres of gravity in different environmental domains. It shifts aspects of authority, legitimacy and effectiveness across the overlapping governance processes.
Still, beyond conceptual contributions under different headings (regime complexes, polycentricity, fragmentation), institutionalist scholars only took modest steps to advance this sprawling debate towards theory-driven analyses, be it from a traditional or from an interpretivist angle. This gap also includes the question of how incumbent intergovernmental institutions interact with transnational newcomers.
The paper argues that such theoretical approaches would not need to reinvent the wheel. It introduces a framework that builds institutional complexity and the emergence of transnational networks into neoliberal, sociological and discursive strands of new institutionalism. On the one hand, the degree of institutional complexity may be explained or understood by key categories of these theories: constellations of power, situation structures, competing knowledge claims and (contested) hegemonic discourses. On the other hand, institutional complexity qualifies some of the effects these theories ascribe to institutions: their capacity to lower transaction costs, to enhance social inclusion and legitimacy, to alter actor’s preferences, or to spread new norms.
The paper briefly illustrates the potential of each of these re-framed institutionalist assumptions, drawing on research results from the Earth System governance project. These examples include: the effects of new public-private arrangements on renewable energies on the authority and legitimacy of the UN climate regime; the evolution of rivalling discourse coalitions of both public and transnational institutions in the governance of genetic resources; the widening of participatory and capacity gaps through the arrival of new public and private funding institutions in global forestry governance.
