Navigating Institutional Complexity in World Politics

Session Submission Type: In-Person Full Paper Panel

Session Description

Global governance structures are increasingly described as highly complex, fragmented, and polycentric. In many issue areas, the creation, design, evolution, and effectiveness of individual governance institutions are fundamentally shaped by how these institutions relate to and interact with other institutions operating in their domain. A large swathe of recent work in international relations and international law acknowledges the importance of institutional complexity for understanding global governance. However, much existing work focuses on developing typologies to better grasp the phenomenon and, empirically, are often based on the study of single cases, or limited to particular issue-areas. In addition, existing works tend to focus on states and formal intergovernmental institutions as the major components of regime complexes, while non-state actors and informal institutional arrangements have received less attention. Thus, despite a fast proliferating literature on institutional complexity, major conceptual, theoretical, and empirical questions remain. The papers on this panel address this research gap. Using new data and innovative methods, they map institutional complexity in a broad range of issue areas of world politics and develop new theoretical arguments to explain the emergence, development, and consequences of institutional complexity. Together, they make important theoretical and empirical contributions to the study of global governance and open up avenues for future research.

Sub Unit

• Division 17: International Collaboration

Individual Presentations

• Navigating Complexity: New Actors and Institutions in Regime Complexes (Pre-Recorded) - Stephanie Claudia Hofmann, Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies; Oliver Westerwinter, University of St. Gallen

• The Global Regime for Digital Governance - Niccolo Bonifai; Abraham Newman, Georgetown University; Qi Zhang, Georgetown University

• Institutional Interaction in Sovereign Debt Restructuring - C. Randall Henning, American University-SIS

• Regime Complexity and a Galvanizing Idea: Development Goals and IGO Coordination - Melanie H. Ram, California State University, Fresno

Chair

• Richard Clark Princeton University

Discussants

• David A. Lake University of California, San Diego

• Richard Clark Princeton University