Managing Institutional Complexity: Regime Interplay and Global Environmental Change

12. Conclusions: Decentralized Interplay Management in an Evolving Interinstitutional Order

12 Conclusions Decentralized Interplay Management in an Evolving Interinstitutional Order Sebastian Oberthür and Olav Schram Stokke This book has focused on two themes central to institutional interaction: interplay management and institutional complexes. The contributions to this volume have addressed one or both of these issues by exploring various fields of international environmental governance, frequently investigating changes over time. The authors have focused on specific institutional complexes, the interplay management of particular interinstitutional relationships, or relevant cross-cutting issues. In this concluding chapter, we pinpoint the main conceptual and empirical findings concerning the two core themes. We present the main findings with respect to each of these themes. First, the contributions to this volume indicate that decentralized interplay management, short of joint or overarching approaches, dominates in global environmental governance—and probably beyond. Interinstitutional relationships seem to have evolved primarily on the basis of collective decisions made separately within one or more of the institutions involved, or through individual decisions by actors outside their formal decision-making processes. Much of this decentralized interplay management has contributed significantly to enhancing the effectiveness of global environmental governance, realizing synergy, or avoiding conflict among institutions. We identify three conditions for variation in such success: shared cross-institutional knowledge, problem malignancy, and political saliency. Second, the volume indicates that, over time, institutional complexes tend to develop relatively stable internal divisions of labor among the elemental institutions. Rather than resulting from rational design, such divisions of labor emerge “spontaneously” from a political process that is framed by material interests in avoiding incompatible commitments and in preserving existing institutions, relatively weak normative frameworks, and evolving cognitional capacities. Once established, the 314 Sebastian Oberthür and Olav Schram Stokke divisions of labor are stabilized by the related mutual expectations of actors and reproduced through practice, but they remain susceptible to change where the underlying balance of power and interests alters signi ficantly. As environmental concerns are relative newcomers in global governance, the rather lengthy processes required to modify the status quo within institutional complexes adds to the challenge of “greening” global governance in time to prevent irreversible damage. Following these major findings, this final chapter highlights key priorities for future research on institutional interaction and institutional complexes . We conclude by summarizing the main findings and highlighting some policy-relevant conclusions that flow from them. In particular, the current prevalence of decentralized forms of interplay management and its success conditions identified (problem malignancy, political saliency, shared knowledge) raise doubts about the feasibility and suitability of proposals for restructuring and centralizing global environmental governance. While we hope and believe that our findings constitute a significant contribution to an evolving scholarly debate, a note of caution seems in order regarding the generalizability or external validity of these findings. As explained in the introductory chapter, the volume is based on an inductive and exploratory approach. The contributions were not specifically designed to make up a representative empirical sample of the phenomena under study, although they do span a wide range of central areas in international environmental governance and were selected without any deliberate bias. As a consequence, the general insights that have been generated, and that are presented in this chapter, cannot claim to have general validity. However, we believe that they can stand as plausible conjectures, given the analyses on which they are based. For future research, they may represent useful working hypotheses waiting to be refuted, further refined, or corroborated. Interplay Management States, organizations, and individuals are often well aware that action under one institution can affect the evolution or consequences of actions under another, and therefore seek to influence those impacts. Actors pursue such interplay management by means that involve various degrees of coordination, ranging from general legal norms on the preeminence of rules to autonomous action by states or others aiming to strengthen one institution on a policy matter involving several institutions. The cases Conclusions 315 and policy areas examined in this volume indicate that decentralized interplay management, with modest or no overarching coordination across institutional boundaries, is a prominent feature of international environmental governance. Moreover, such interplay management often helps to ameliorate problems that many authors have associated with institutional interaction: fragmented and contested knowledge on overlapping issues (Alter and Meunier 2009), duplication of effort (Andresen 2001), and normative ambiguity due to conflicting commitments under separate institutions (Brown Weiss 1993; Drezner 2009). While such interplay...