Managing Institutional Complexity: Regime Interplay and Global Environmental Change

8. Regime Conflicts and Their Management in Global Environmental Governance

8 Regime Conflicts and Their Management in Global Environmental Governance Fariborz Zelli Research on institutional interplay looks beyond the confines of a single institution, seeking to grasp its synergetic or disruptive interactions with other regimes or organizations. Despite the inherent centrality of institutional environments, however, most theoretical approaches stop short of considering the deeper structures in which these interactions are embedded. As Underdal (2006, 9) observes, the focus so far has been “primarily 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.” In this chapter, I address this research gap by introducing an analytical framework that includes “major determinants of human behavior and social outcomes” (Underdal 2006, 8) in the explanatory model. This framework deals with a particular type of institutional interplay— conflicts among international regimes—and aims to support the analysis of interplay management within institutional complexes. Over the past two decades, regime conflicts have become more frequent in global environmental governance, sometimes including not only environmental regimes but also regimes aimed at regulating other domains, such as international trade. These conflicts can have significant consequences for the functionality and effectiveness of the affected regimes. By bringing in such core determinants as knowledge and power structures, the framework permits a more in-depth analysis of those consequences. Specifically ,itshouldhelptoelucidatewhetheroneoftheseregimesprevails—and if so, why. Building on international relations theories and pioneering studies on institutional interplay (Chambers 2001a; Oberthür and Gehring 2006a; Stokke 2001a), I successively introduce the various building blocks of the analytical framework. First I define the term “international regime conflict” in a broad manner, showing that conflict can emerge not only 200 Fariborz Zelli from legal incompatibility but also from related behavioral contradictions . This extensive understanding of regime conflicts provides a basis for including major determinants of social behavior. I then introduce the framework’s dependent variable: the prevalence of one of the involved regimes. For both pragmatic and substantive reasons, prevalence is framed in terms of a regime’s output effectiveness, that is, the norms and rules it produces. A regime is considered to prevail if it generates stronger output on the contested issues than does the colliding regime. The development of third institutions may also be relevant if their output concerns these contested issues. This chapter thereby adumbrates one of the core topics of this volume, namely, the forces driving the emergence of institutional complexes. The framework also attends to the second main research question of this volume, the role of interplay management. I establish the process of conflict management as the major intermediate process through which independent variables may affect the prevalence of a regime. I then introduce two independent variables central to international relations theories, power structure and knowledge structure. Power structure is presented as the constellation of power among countries, whereas knowledge structure is considered to be the basis of knowledge about the contested issues. For each of these determinants, I develop a configurational hypothesis and discuss obstructing or magnifying conditions. The concluding section summarizes the components and causal assumptions of this analytical framework. Throughout the chapter I illustrate the various components of this framework by referring to the conflict between the UN climate regime and the World Trade Organization (WTO). Defining the Research Object: Conflicts among International Regimes A regime conflict is here defined as a functional overlap among two or more international regimes that involves a significant contradiction of rules or rule-related behavior. This definition builds on three more generic terms: international regimes, regime interactions, and conflict. I follow Keohane’s definition of international regimes as “institutions with explicit rules, agreed upon by governments, that pertain to particular sets of issues in international relations” (Keohane 1993, 28). How do such “institutions with explicit rules” interact? Oran Young (1996, 2–6) distinguishes several types of interaction, including “overlapping institutions ,” or regimes formed for different purposes and largely without Regime Conflicts and Global Environmental Governance 201 reference to one another but intersecting “on a de facto basis, producing substantial impacts on each other in the process” (ibid., 6). Young’s understanding of overlapping regimes is a major building block of my definition of regime conflict, but “overlapping” does not necessarily mean “conflictive...