The fragmentation of the global climate governance architecture

Abstract

The term fragmentation implies that policy domains are marked by a patchwork of public and private institutions that differ in their character, constituencies, spatial scope, subject matter, and objectives. While the degree of fragmentation varies across issue areas and their respective architectures, global climate politics is characterized by an advanced state of institutional diversity. In recent years, scholars have increasingly addressed this emerging phenomenon of international relations. The article finds that the predominant focus of these studies has been on dyadic overlaps, i.e., interlinkages between two institutions, and less on the overarching level of entire architectures and their degree of fragmentation. This goes in particular for research on the global climate change architecture. Many studies have attended to the relationship between the United Nations climate regime and other institutions: multilateral technology partnerships, regimes regulating other environmental domains like ozone or biological diversity, and regimes from non-environmental issue areas like the world trade regime. However, a cross-cutting account of these overlaps which addresses the overall implications of institutional fragmentation on climate change is still missing. As possible areas for further research the article identifies: consequences of fragmentation (e.g., a new division of labor or increased inter-institutional conflict), fragmentation management and conditions of its effectiveness; theory-driven analyses on the reasons of fragmentation within and across policy domains.

Special issue: managing fragmentation and complexity in the emerging system of international climate finance

“…Zelli 2011). Yet it is also instructive to focus on the ''vertical'' dimension of fragmentation; that is, on the extent to which actor constellations, norms and institutions involved in climate finance are fragmented across national and subnational levels of governance, rather than purely on the international (''horizontal'') level.…”

Reversing the Marginalization of Global Environmental Politics in International Relations: An Opportunity for the Discipline

“…The environmental realm has been perhaps the largest source of empirical studies of transitional governance institutions, especially public-private partnerships, voluntary regulations and certification schemes, transgovernmental networks, and private authority. By assessing these developments, scholars of environmental politics help us to understand the effects of an increasingly dense and overlapping set of governance institutions and processes, highlighting questions of regime complexity (Keohane and Victor 2011;Raustiala and Victor 2004), fragmentation (Biermann et al 2009;Zelli 2011), institutional ecosystems (Abbott et al 2016), and polycentricity (Ostrom 2010).…”

Encyclopedia of Global Environmental Governance and Politics

“…To take an illustration, the global climate governance architecture is not only made up of those institutional arrangements that predominantly address Climate change, i.e., the United Nations (UN) climate regime and several new multilateral clean technology partnerships. In addition, it includes a large number of further institutions whose agendas have been increasingly touching upon the issue-institutions as diverse as the Biodiversity and Ozone regimes, the World Trade Organization (WTO), the UN Security Council, or the Group of 20 (G20) (Biermann et al 2009;Keohane and Victor 2011;Zelli 2011a; see also Clubs; Security; Trade; United Nations). Fragmentation, thus, is a matter of degree and may vary considerably across issue areas, spanning a continuum from domains with relatively low levels of fragmentation to highly intricate institutional complexes.…”