Institutional Complexity and Political Agency in Polycentric Governance: Integrating Tenets and Insights from Global Governance and Social Complexity Research

In this paper we address the ways in which the institutional complexity of polycentric global climate governance enables or constrains political agency. In doing so, we seek to contribute to the emerging and much-needed dialogue between the study of global governance and the study of social complexity. In a first step, we outline why that dialogue is needed – concretely, how integrating tenets, methods and insights from complexity sciences can help us to conceptualise and analyse institutional complexity as a structural characteristic of polycentric global governance that has a profound impact on spaces for political agency. We then argue that the degree of political agency that actors have under institutional complexity depends inter alia upon their core organizational and epistemic qualities, including, for example, a central position or brokerage function in a policy network, or a relatively generalist and flexible knowledge of the governance system in question. We illustrate these organizational and epistemic qualities of political actors, and the implications they may have, with examples from global climate governance. These examples include inter alia the shifting spaces for agency of the UN climate secretariat, pluri- and minilateral climate arrangements, country governments and NGOs as well as legitimacy audiences. We show for these contexts how certain organisational and epistemic qualities may facilitate new forms of power (e.g., nodal power in a network), techniques (e.g. shopping amongst institutional alternatives) and legitimacy (e.g., peer or mutual accountability) for navigating institutional systems that cast uncertainty and sometimes unpredictability on actors.