Abstract
Over the past decades, the growing proliferation of international institutions governing the global environment has impelled institutional interplay as a result of functional and normative overlap across multiple regimes. This article synthesizes primary contributions made in research on institutional interplay over the past twenty years, with particular focus on publications with International Environmental Agreements: Politics, Law and Economics. Broadening our understanding about the different types, dimensions, pathways, and effects of institutional interplay, scholars have produced key insights into the ways and means by which international institutions cooperate, manage discord, engage in problem solving, and capture synergies across levels and scales. As global environmental governance has become increasingly fragmented and complex, we recognize that recent studies have highlighted the growing interactions between transnationally operating institutions in the wake of polycentric governance and hybrid institutional complexes. However, our findings reveal that there is insufficient empirical and conceptual research to fully understand the relationship, causes, and consequences of interplay between intergovernmental and transnational institutions. Reflecting on the challenges of addressing regulatory gaps and mitigating the crisis of multilateralism, we expound the present research frontier for further advancing research on institutional interplay and provide recommendations to support policy-making.
Highlights
Following the growth of international environmental institutions from the 1970s, intergovernmental and transnational environmental governance has rapidly proliferated over the last few decades
We argue that research on institutional interplay has produced key insights and tools for understanding and managing related inter-institutional mechanisms, dynamics, and effects but, importantly, still has to grasp more fully the transnational turn of global environmental governance
Institutional interplay broadly refers to situations in which the operation, performance, and/ or development of one institution is affected by another institution (Jinnah, 2010; Oberthür & Stokke, 2011)
Summary
Following the growth of international environmental institutions from the 1970s, intergovernmental and transnational environmental governance has rapidly proliferated over the last few decades. Not least due to diverging economic and power-related interests, cooperation among nation states in intergovernmental institutions (encompassing international organizations, treaty-based international regimes, and more informal cooperative fora and initiatives) has fallen short in addressing even the most pressing transboundary environmental challenges, such as climate change, biodiversity loss, or land degradation (e.g., Biermann & Pattberg, 2012; Hale et al, 2013) Solving these problems warrants coordination across a variety of institutions featuring many actors and encompassing different levels and scales of governance. Looking back at the advancements made in the study of institutional interplay, we find that linkages involving transnational environmental institutions remains an understudied phenomenon in this literature In this emerging field of research, we argue that increased scholarly attention is needed to enhance our understanding of how transnational institutions impact interplay dynamics, including their broader implications for global environmental governance, with regards to addressing the crisis of multilateralism We synthesize our analysis and highlight potential avenues for the future study of institutional interplay (Sect. 5)
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