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Emergent Order in International Regime Complexes: Cross-Complex Comparison

Sat, August 31, 10:00 to 11:30am, Hilton, Columbia 10

Session Submission Type: Full Paper Panel

Session Description

The study of international regime complexity has emerged as a discrete subfield within the International Organization research program. While the general IO program addresses the origins, operation, and effect of international institutions, the subfield of regime complexity is distinctive in its focus on the proliferation and interaction of multiple institutions in the same issue area, how states and other actors navigate among them, and whether they deliver international cooperation and normatively superior substantive outcomes. (See, for example, Alter and Raustiala 2018)

Many scholars argue that the fragmentation of governance across multiple institutions poses a threat to the effectiveness of international cooperation. These analysts fear that ambiguity over international standards, inconsistency of rules and obligations, and opportunities for forum shopping weaken the discipline of global governance on member states. (See, among others, Aggarwal 1998, Alter and Meunier 2009, Biermann et al. 2009, and Raustiala and Victor 2004.) Others contend that regime complexes facilitate more effective cooperation: they increase flexibility, boost legitimacy, and engender greater expertise compared to unified regimes. (Keohane and Victor 2011, Kelley 2009, Lesage and Van de Graaf, 2013, for example.) But the reasons why some complexes produce more favorable outcomes than others remain insufficiently examined. (For exceptions, see Johnson and Urpelainen 2012 and Orsini, Morin, and Young 2013.)

Our panel uses the principles by which complexes are ordered to explain this variation in outcomes. We highlight three dimensions – relations of authority, differentiation, and operational independence – along which sets of overlapping institutions differ. A fragmented regime complex is an ideal type that sits at one end of all three dimensions: institutions are non-hierarchically arranged, undifferentiated, and independent. The opposite ideal type is a fully integrated regime, where governance processes are hierarchical, differentiated, and operate collectively. Empirically, many regime complexes will take intermediate values on one or more of the three dimensions.

This panel examines these patterns through the comparative analysis of regime complexes, selecting cases that give explanatory leverage over these dimensions.

The paper by Henning and Pratt, “Emergent Order in International Regime Complexes” offers the analytical framework, elaborating on the dimensions of order and hypothesizing their relationship to substantive outcomes. It draws on cases of both relatively integrated (crisis and development finance) and fragmented (election monitoring and climate change) complexes in formulating conjectures.

Jean-Frédéric Morin, in his paper on international investment, examines a regime complex that sits at the fragmented end of the spectrum on all three dimensions, formally, but exhibits progressive strengthening of authority relations and differentiation over time through an informal process of institutional learning.

Jessica Green and Jennifer Hadden explain the emergence of order in the regime complex for global environmental governance, highlighting the establishment of new forms of institutions as actors seek new resources and new mechanisms of legitimation. Relations of authority and operational dependence among IOs and NGOs evolve as new actors emerge and differentiate themselves.

Phillip Lipscy emphasizes competition among international institutions in the quest for resources in the area of development assistance. His paper demonstrates that institutions that are more flexible and accountable are better equipped to prevail in competition than those that are rigid and unresponsive. As the institutions themselves evolve, we can expect differentiation and operational and authority relations to also evolve through the selection process that Lipscy identifies.

We aim to exploit the variation in this set of regime complexes to shed light on the effects of ordering principles on final outcomes. Outcomes might vary with respect to the behavior of states, non-state actors and stakeholders in the institutions themselves (cooperative outcomes) or with respect to substantive responses to functional problems, such as environmental improvement and respect for human rights (substantive outcomes). The ultimate test of the value of our approach is whether it facilitates discovery of new causal channels and enables authors to better explain the outcomes of cooperation and conflict in dense institutional settings.

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