Managing Institutional Complexity: Regime Interplay and Global Environmental Change

6. Interplay Management, Niche Selection, and Arctic Environmental Governance

6 Interplay Management, Niche Selection, and Arctic Environmental Governance Olav Schram Stokke This chapter develops and applies a framework for analyzing strategic interplay management decisions on specialization and division of labor within larger institutional complexes. The framework identifies several institutional niches, or governance tasks, that an institution may focus on within the broader set of efforts to solve a particular environmental problem. Such strategic decisions are highly topical in Arctic environmental governance, which revolves around the relationship between global institutions like those based on the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) and several regional institutions concerning the Arctic in particular. The larger question of achieving cross-institutional interplay that can promote effectiveness is relevant in any region or issue area because efforts to solve specific problems usually involve more than one institution. The next section links the notion of institutional niches to certain general tasks of governance: building knowledge, creating norms, enhancing capacity, and enforcing compliance. Findings from regime effectivenessresearchcanhelpidentifyconditionsforeffectivenicheselection —that is, one generating interplay with other institutions that assists in mitigating or solving the problem at hand. Two questions guide this analysis. In the larger complex, which governance tasks are in particular need of strengthening? And does the focal institution have distinctive features that equip it to provide such strengthening? The next section elaborates on the niche approach by extracting, from four cases of Arctic environmental governance, some general lessons on institutional requirements for occupying each of the governance niches effectively. The concluding section summarizes the findings and draws some implications for interplay management in institutional complexes. 144 Olav Schram Stokke Niche Selection and Interplay: Aiming for Effectiveness The human activities an international institution seeks to influence are often subject to rules or programs under several institutions operating at different levels of governance or focusing on different areas of activity, or aspects of the same activity. That macrofact, which Stokke and Oberthür in this volume term an “institutional complex,” poses a microquestion for participants in each institution: How can they maximize its contribution to the overall system of governance with the aim of mitigating or solving a problem of environmental management? Selection of Governance Niches Institutional interplay means that one institution affects the contents, operations, or consequences of another; interplay management involves efforts to impede, trigger, or shape such impact.1 Niche selection concerns a strategic aspect of interplay management: the governance tasks that those operating an international institution decide to focus on and where they challenge other institutions. In ecology, a “niche” denotes the position of a species or population in an ecosystem, notably that segment of a resource domain where it outcompetes other local populations. Used as a metaphor in organizational analysis, the niche concept highlights the relationship between institutional features and the ability to extract the resources necessary for organizational survival (Hannan and Freeman 1977; Aldrich 1999, 226). In the environmental area, we may distinguish among four governance tasks, each defining a particular institutional niche. First, environmental governance requires knowledge about the severity of the problem and, preferably, of the effects of various options for dealing with it. A second governance task is elaboration of behavioral norms, whether soft-law instruments or binding rules. Third, multilateral institutions frequently seek to facilitate implementation of such norms in cases where some participants would otherwise be unable to heed them, for instance through funding or specific capacity-building programs. The fourth task, rule enforcement, is often a weak point in international environmental governance, since structures for behavioral monitoring, compliance review, and administration of sanction in cases of rule violation are often feeble or nonexistent. Within an issue area, some institutions may attend to the full range of governance tasks, while others specialize in one or a few of them. For instance, regarding the management of cod in the Barents Sea, the Interplay Management 145 Norwegian-Russian Joint Fisheries Commission has carved out a broad niche aiming to engage in all four governance tasks, but it leans heavily on other institutions for two of them. In this particular complex, the International Council for the Exploration of the Sea (ICES) occupies a knowledge-building niche in the governance of these and other fisheries; and, as I show below, the North-East Atlantic Fisheries Commission (NEAFC) has become increasingly important in rule enforcement. According to the principle of competitive exclusion, no two species can occupy the same niche for a long...