Managing Institutional Complexity

Institutional interaction and complexity are crucial to environmental governance andare quickly becoming dominant themes in the international relations and environmental politicsliteratures. This book examines international institutional interplay and its consequences, focusingon two important issues: how states and other actors can manage institutional interaction to improvesynergy and avoid disruption; and what forces drive the emergence and evolution of institutionalcomplexes, sets of institutions that cogovern particular issue areas. The book, a product of theInstitutional Dimensions of Global Environmental Change research project (IDGEC), offers boththeoretical and empirical perspectives. Chapters range from analytical overviews to case studies ofinstitutional interaction, interplay management, and regime complexes in areas including climatechange, fisheries management, and conservation of biodiversity. Contributors discuss such issues asthe complicated management of fragmented multilateral institutions addressing climate change; thepossible "chilling effect" on environmental standards from existing commitments;governance niches in Arctic resource protection; the relationships among treaties on conservationand use of plant genetic resources; causal factors in cross-case variation of regime prevalence; andthe difficult relationship between the World Trade Organization and multilateral environmentalagreements. The book offers a broad overview of research on interplay management and institutionalcomplexes that provides important insights across the field of global environmental governance.

The hardcover edition does not include a dust jacket.

Sebastian Oberthur is Academic Director of the Institute for European Studies at Free University Brussels and the coeditor (with Thomas Gehring) of Institutional Interaction in Global Environmental Governance: Synergy and Conflict among International and EU Policies (MIT Press, 2006). Olav Schram Stokke is Research Professor at the Fridtjof Nansen Institute in Norway and editor of Governing High Seas Fisheries: The Interplay of Global and Regional Regimes.