Managing Institutional Complexity: Regime Interplay and Global Environmental Change

Foreword

Foreword Oran R. Young During the preparation of the Science Plan for the long-term project on the Institutional Dimensions of Global Environmental Change (IDGEC) in 1997 and 1998, we spent a lot of time discussing what emerged as the project’s analytical themes, or the set of topics we deemed ripe for a major research push over a period of five to ten years. The themes we selected became known in the research community as the problems of fit, interplay, and scale (Young et al. 1999/2005). The problem of fit is a matter of compatibility between the features of institutional arrangements or governance systems and the character of the socioecological systems they are designed to manage. The problem of interplay concerns interactions between and among regimes created to address specific issues, such as climate and trade, that belong to separate issue areas. The problem of scale is a matter of the generalizability of findings relating to governance systems in the dimensions of space, time, and authority. As the synthesis volume we produced to record the most important results of IDGEC research makes clear, the project played a significant role in advancing knowledge regarding all three of these analytical themes (Young, King, and Schroeder 2008). The stream of research that IDGEC triggered relating to institutional interplay or interactions among governance systems has proved particularly robust. In the IDGEC Science Plan, we drew simple distinctions between horizontal and vertical interplay and between functional and political interplay. This yielded a 2 × 2 matrix pointing to four different types of interplay. The matrix proved sufficient to trigger a growing and increasingly sophisticated body of research on institutional interplay. I am happy to report that it also led a number of researchers, including the editors of this volume, to raise probing questions about the formulation included in the IDGEC Science Plan and to experiment with new and improved ways to frame some of the important research questions viii Foreword pertaining to interplay. This sort of critical but constructive analysis exemplifies the best traditions in scientific research, and the results have broadened and deepened our understanding of this important subject. One major finding of the stream of recent research on institutional interplay is that interactions between regimes can produce mutually beneficial and even synergistic results (Oberthür and Gehring 2006). Although intuitively this may not seem surprising, it is worth noting that much of the initial interest in interplay arose from a concern that the rapid growth in the number of international regimes would trigger a substantial increase in conflicts in this realm. The prospect of tensions and even open conflict between the global trade regime and various multilateral environmental agreements undoubtedly fueled this concern. But as the work of scholars such as Thomas Gehring and Sebastian Oberthür has made clear, conflict is by no means inevitable in this realm. Others have shown that regimes often occupy distinct niches, performing tasks such as building knowledge, creating norms, enhancing capacity, and enforcing compliance (Stokke 2007). This means that, at least in some cases, distinct regimes may develop in a manner that is complementary rather than conflictual. This book, which is one of the last of the scientific products directly attributable to the IDGEC project, carries this stream of research forward with chapters that report on the latest findings of cutting-edge research regarding institutional interplay. Although each of the chapters has its own story to tell, the editors have done an excellent job in showing how, in aggregate, they shed substantial light on two prominent themes, interplay management and institutional complexes. Interplay management refers to conscious efforts on the part of those associated with distinct regimes or those approaching these matters in more synoptic terms to enhance positive interactions and minimize interference between and among regimes. This theme will surely increase in prominence in the near future. Institutional complexes arise when two or more distinct regimes generate interlocking governance structures relating to broad issue areas (e.g., climate, biodiversity) and coevolve in such a way as to produce emergent properties. The emergence of such complexes, whether they represent planned developments or reflect de facto trends, is another phenomenon that is of growing significance in a world in which both the number and the variety of international regimes are on the increase. The importance of institutional interplay is destined to grow as more and more issues appear requiring governance systems that are...