Global Environmental Governance Reconsidered

8. Horizontal Institutional Interlinkages

8 Horizontal Institutional Interlinkages Fariborz Zelli, Aarti Gupta, and Harro van Asselt In this chapter, we analyze the increasingly important phenomenon of institutional interlinkages in global environmental governance. Institutional interlinkages are connections among policy processes, rules, norms, and principles of two or more institutions. We focus on the international level and hence on horizontal interlinkages between one or more international (environmental) institutions. From the mid-1990s onward, the global governance literature has put greater emphasis on analyzing such interlinkages (Herr and Chia 1995; Young 1996). In addition to initial conceptual approaches and single case studies (Rosendal 2001; Stokke 2001a; Young 2002, 2008), major research projects have analyzed conflictive and synergistic interlinkages across international institutions. These include the Inter-Linkages Initiative of UN University (Chambers 2008), the Institutional Interaction Project (Oberthür and Gehring 2006b), and the Institutional Dimensions of Global Environmental Change project (Young 2002; Young, King, and Schroeder 2008). In the Global Governance Project, we have examined horizontal institutional interlinkages from legal and political perspectives (e.g., van Asselt, Gupta, and Biermann 2005; van Asselt, Sindico, and Mehling 2008; van Asselt 2011a; Biermann et al. 2009, 2010; Falkner and Gupta 2009; Gupta 2008; Zelli 2007, 2011b; Zelli et al. 2010). In the following, we build on this growing body of work by adopting a norm-based approach to the study of horizontal institutional interlinkages . Specifically, we place institutional interlinkages in an overarching context of global normative developments and consider whether and how this broader normative context is shaping the nature and evolution of a specific set of horizontal institutional interactions. We take as our point of departure that a regime and its provisions and procedures cannot be understood in isolation from the broader normative context within which it is embedded. The normative structures 176 Fariborz Zelli, Aarti Gupta, and Harro van Asselt that shape individual regimes also affect interactions between regimes. If specific regimes are (at least partial) articulations of broader governance norms, then it follows that interlinkages between them are sites for collusion or contestation over these broader norms. To elaborate and test the validity of this claim, we proceed as follows. In the next section, we conceptualize in more detail the norm-based approach to horizontal institutional interlinkages adopted here. Following this, we apply our conceptual framework to the analysis of three dyadic institutional interlinkages in the global environmental and trade realms: between the UN climate regime and the World Trade Organization (WTO); between the UN climate regime and the Convention on Biological Diversity (“biodiversity convention”); and between the Cartagena Protocol on Biosafety under the biodiversity convention and the WTO. In exploring the evolving institutional interactions in each of these cases, we argue that a dominant global norm of liberal environmentalism is shaping these interactions in important ways, even as the dominance of this global norm remains contested by key actors across all three cases. In concluding, we draw out the implications of our analysis for a future research agenda in the field of horizontal institutional interlinkages. Conceptualization In two decades of analysis of what has variously been termed institutional interplay, interlinkage, interconnection, or interaction—with, in our view, not much difference in meaning among these different terms—scholarly understanding of this phenomenon has advanced significantly. Leading scholars in this field still deplore, however, the “limited progress . . . on rooting the study of interplay theoretically” (Chambers, Kim, and ten Have 2008, 7) and the lack of “theoretical concerns that can help us to understand the origins and consequences of interplay” (Young 2008, 134). Others have criticized the proliferation of typologies of institutional interlinkages as a key scholarly focus. As Selin and VanDeveer (2003, 14) observe, “The literature on linkages remains littered with proposed taxonomies of linkages.” Some scholars have sought to go beyond typological accounts and develop elaborate explanatory models (e.g., Oberthür and Gehring 2006a; Rosendal 2001; Stokke 2001b). Yet, as Underdal (2006, 9) notes, much focus has been “on interaction at the level of specific regimes and less on links to the kind of basic ordering principles or norms highlighted in realist and sociological analyses of institutions.” Horizontal Institutional Interlinkages 177 In this context, we explore in this chapter the promise of one particular analytical lens: examining institutional interactions within the broader normative context that shapes such interactions. We focus on how an overarching normative environment affects the prospects for conflict (or lack thereof) in such institutional interactions, paying attention to the conflictive...