The paper starts from the assumption that the increasing fragmentation of global environmental governance is an institutional mirror image of the material complexity inherent to the Anthropocene.
It then develops a novel theoretical framework that builds fragmentation into assumptions of neoliberal, sociological and discursive approaches to institutionalism. The degree of fragmentation may be explained or interpreted by the very different explanatory or interpretative concepts of such theories: constellations of capacities, situation structures, competing knowledge claims and (contested) hegemonic discourses. On the other hand, fragmentation qualifies some of the effects that these theories ascribe to institutions and underlying power structures, e.g. their capacity to lower transaction costs or to spread new norms.
To illustrate the usefulness of this framework – but also its epistemological limits – the paper refers to examples from various domains of Earth system governance: climate change, biodiversity, forestry and plant genetic resources.
