Fragmentation of Global Environmental Governance Architectures: A Literature Review

Abstract

As the issue of fragmentation of global environmental governance moved to the centre of debate on governance performance and effectiveness in addressing environmental problems, it attracted scholars from both international law and political science. Each of the disciplines have provided a set of valuable insights into the cases of fragmentation based on distinct analytical approaches and models. However, there is a clear lack of consensus in the literature on conceptualization and various typologies of fragmentation, its causes and consequences as well as views on management approaches. Accordingly, this paper reviews and maps this burgeoning body of research with the aim to contribute to these debates by offering a structured literature review on the various conceptualizations of fragmentation of global governance, identify common analytical themes and touch upon possibilities for integrated research. As this literature review paper illustrates, the concept of fragmentation has evolved from various legal debates on strengthening the overall international system of law and ensuring legal certainty to resembling the literature on global environmental governance in the context of today‘s transformations of world politics. Furthermore, we conclude that the concept of fragmentation within the framework of global governance architecture appears as a promising lens where each of the different perspectives within international law and political science could theoretically and methodologically merge. Moreover, when considering common analytical problems that each of the disciplines addresses, namely mapping and measuring the degree of fragmentation, examining its causes and consequences and management approaches, one can conclude that the different accounts of these analytical problems are essentially not conflictive, but instead complementary to each other. Therefore, one would need to employ a whole spectrum of perspectives, approaches and tools in order to address these four analytical themes associated with the fragmentation of global governance and accordingly propose concrete management and policy options for increasing the overall institutional performance in terms of sustainable development.