Managing Institutional Complexity: Regime Interplay and Global Environmental Change (review)

With the steady increase of the number of international treaties, estimated at more than 55,000 in 1997, including some 900 multilateral agreements on environmental matters (p. 5), the issues of fragmentation, overlap, and potential conflict between international regimes are drawing increased attention. In particular, the uncoordinated development of international policy within and between areas has given rise to concerns about the effectiveness of these international efforts, notably with regard to environmental issues.

Managing Institutional Complexity: Regime Interplay and Global Environmental Change, one of the outcomes of the Institutional Dimensions of Global Environmental Change project, aims to "advance our understanding of inter-institutional influence and its consequences" by focusing on two main questions: "How states and other actors, individually and collectively, go about improving interinstitutional synergy or avoiding disruption, and what factors condition their success," referred to as interplay management; and "what forces drive the emergence and change of so-called institutional complexes—complex interaction situations in which two or more international institutions interact to cogovern issue areas in international relations." The book aims to enhance understanding of these matters by putting forward theoretical concepts and ideas and by including studies on instances and aspects of interplay management and institutional complexes.

In the introduction, the editors lay the conceptual foundations for the book by introducing and clarifying the concepts of international institutions, institutional interaction, interplay management, and institutional complexes. The second chapter provides an overview of the state of the art of the research on institutional interaction. Some of the findings, which the authors derive from a range of empirical studies, provide the tentative starting points for the formulation of ideas (if not hypotheses) regarding causal mechanisms that influence the extent of conflict or synergy between agreements and regimes, such as the role and power of knowledge and ideas, issues associated with overlapping membership, and interactions at the impact level. The authors put forward a set of research questions, based on two variables (the level of analysis and the unit of analysis), to guide research in this area.

The subsequent nine chapters offer a range of case studies on institutional interaction focusing on particular aspects or issues, such as climate governance, the interaction between the Montreal and Kyoto Protocols, Arctic environmental governance, regimes affecting plant genetic resources (and the role of expert networks), trade and the environment, fisheries management, and "interplay management" between the climate, energy and development regimes. The chapters are informative and well researched, and often shed new light on the way regimes function and have evolved in a broader context, both within the environmental and the non-environmental (notably trade) realms.

A concluding chapter from the editors draws together the main findings of these studies. The first of these findings is that decentralized interplay management is dominant in global environmental governance. In most cases where regimes affect each other, the issues are addressed (although not necessarily resolved) separately by actors within the regimes involved, not by coordinated action at a higher level. This finding is far from surprising, as international institutional interplay management operates in a context in which there is no central authority and no formal hierarchy among regimes. The second main finding is that where regimes interact or overlap in the same issue area, a kind of division of labor between the regimes evolves, creating relatively stable "institutional complexes" within which actors come to accept each others' roles and responsibilities. An example of such an institutional complex can be found, according to the authors, in the relationship that has evolved between the WTO and a range of multilateral environmental agreements.

What insights does the book offer with regard to advancement of effective international and global environmental management? According to the authors themselves, the findings indicate that, with respect to environmental effectiveness and achievement, at best, the "glass is still only half full" (p. 321), and that the status quo bias of institutional complexes is problematic for those who believe that more fundamental institutional change is required...