Informality in the Face of Institutions: The Pathways Framework, the Governance of Energy and the 'Global Nuclear Revival'

By opening up the question of the multiple ways in which global governance arrangements (and the multiple actors and institutions that take part in them) can influence domestic policy outputs and outcomes, governance approaches continue to break down traditional sub-disciplinary boundaries in political science. Students of policy domains who suspect the existence of significant but weakly institutionalized international influences on domestic policy now have a variety of theoretical tools to do justice to the informal influences that were not being captured in older theoretical approaches. This paper develops a theoretical framework to capture both the effects of informal governance arrangements on domestic policy and, equally important, the interaction between informal and the more formal arrangements for global governance that continue to exist. The “pathways framework” was created to explain the continuing importance of global drivers of policy change in many countries’ forest sectors in spite of (perhaps because of) a very weak set of international institutions forming what might charitably be called a global forest regime complex. To explain this apparent paradox, Bernstein and Cashore propose four pathways of influence from the global to the local in order of increasing informality: rules, norms, markets and direct access. The paper uses the framework to identify and track activity along these pathways in the case of the global governance of energy, another notoriously complex architecture, albeit one with some significantly more powerful institutions than forest governance. In doing so it addresses the workshop’s focus on mechanism and explains the surprising persistence of informal interactions both within and between formal organizations. The pathways framework is presented as a supplement to rather than a competitor of the prevailing network governance metaphors in this area, supporting the attribution of causal logics to the otherwise rather vague concept of global governance “influences” on domestic policy.