What have scholars learned over the past decade about the forces that shape the creation, design, and adaptation of intergovernmental institutions in earth system governance and their influence on state behaviour? Context characteristics – shared, science-based knowledge; the behaviours involved; and the availability of alternative behaviours – can shape institutional creation, design and adaptation. The strategies states, existing institutions and non-state actors deploy, in turn, can promote institutional formation despite challenges or inhibit it despite propitious conditions. Context characteristics also can pose larger or smaller obstacles to institutional effectiveness. Institutions prove more effective when their designs reflect political, economic and social constraints as well as major actors’ power and incentives. They shape material, ideational and normative incentives and opportunities that channel states toward positive behaviours and away from negative ones. New research can build on recent findings by investigating complex interactions at and across the international, transnational, domestic and subnational levels of earth system governance.

This chapter analyzes the fragmentation of architectures of earth system governance. We start with a conceptualization of governance fragmentation and its relation to concepts such as polycentricity and institutional complexity. We then review the origins of governance fragmentation and its problematization, methodological approaches to studying fragmentation and the impacts and consequences of fragmentation. We conclude by identifying future research directions in this domain. Our research shows that fragmentation is ubiquitous, that it varies among policy areas and governance areas and that it is a variable that can be assessed in comparative research across policy areas and over time. The review is based on a comprehensive study of the literature on governance fragmentation over the last decade. We draw on a Scopus search on all articles published in the subject area of social sciences from 2009 to 2018, supplemented by additional studies, such as books, book chapters and a few policy briefs and working papers.

The C40 city-network claims a position of global leadership in the governance of climate change. This chapter provides a brief overview of the history of the network, its member cities, and their collective aims and objectives. The chapter introduces the empirical puzzle around which the book is organized, namely the ability of the C40 to achieve coordinated action from a diverse collection of cities despite relying on voluntary participation and engagement. The ability to do so sets the C40 apart from other similar city-networks and begs the question as to how it has been able to achieve coordination and collective effort. The chapter asserts that such voluntary coordination is only possible through the formation of a collective identity and draws on ideas from the scholarship on social fields, social constructivism, and social movements to develop a theory of global urban governance fields that explains when, how, and why the C40 has managed to generate convergence around a set of governance norms and a shared governance identity.

A growing literature recognizes treaty secretariats and other international bureaucracies as distinctive actors in global environmental governance. These actors exhibit varying degrees of autonomy, authority and influence on environmental governance processes and outcomes. This chapter reviews recent scholarship on international bureaucracies and highlights the distinct ways in which they exert influence beyond their narrow functional mandates. More specifically, this chapter highlights how international bureaucracies influence governance processes by deriving authority from structural characteristics of the international system, exerting influence from their ability to deliver specific administrative and governance functions and leveraging their organizational autonomy. The chapter outlines empirical and conceptual gaps in our understanding of how international bureaucracies function in global environmental governance, and argues that the dynamics of change in world politics may open new pathways of influence for these actors moving forward.

Given the regulatory gap in earth system governance, numerous new governance initiatives, such as multilateral clubs, private certification schemes and multi-stakeholder forums, have emerged to tackle transboundary environmental challenges. This plethora of different governance initiatives has led to a significant increase in the institutional complexity of global (environmental) policymaking and to more interlinkages between such institutions. Chapter 6 perceives dyadic institutional interlinkages as a key ‘microscopic’ structural feature of the overall global governance landscape and most basic building blocks or units of analysis in current scholarship on global governance architectures. After defining the term institutional interlinkages, we synthesize the literature on institutional interlinkages with a particular view on the expansion of interlinkages across different governance levels and scales. Against this backdrop, we examine to what extent the existing concepts and typologies of institutional interlinkages can capture the various new interlinkages between different kinds of institutions in earth system governance.

This chapter traces the emergence and evolution of the concept of ‘regime complex’. Coined by Kal Raustiala and David Victor in their seminal 2004 article, the term calls anyone who aspires to understand the creation, evolution, implementation or effectiveness of a particular institution to take into account its broader institutional environment. A key innovation in the literature on international institutions, it spawned a rich body of work, rapidly becoming a central element of the theoretical repertoire of global governance. The chapter takes stock of this literature, discussing the main insights on causes, evolution and consequences, as well as the research methodologies that have been used to study regime complexes in various issue-areas of international politics. It also discusses avenues for future research, which may contribute to a deeper and theoretically informed understanding of regime complexity and its implications for global governance.

Issues of governance arising in areas beyond national jurisdiction are rising rapidly as priority concerns. In thinking about institutional architectures for these areas, it is helpful to subdivide this class of issues into three subcategories dealing with: (i) international spaces or areas easy to locate in spatial terms; (ii) earth systems that play critical roles in determining the habitability of the planet; and (iii) virtual systems that are increasingly important but difficult to locate in spatial terms. Focusing on one prominent example exemplifying each of these subcategories – the high seas, the earth’s climate system and cyberspace – this chapter seeks to identify lessons of general interest regarding the governance of areas beyond national jurisdiction. It directs attention to the importance of process in contrast to substance, the role of discursive embeddedness, and the importance of balancing stability and agility in a world featuring increasingly complex systems.

The C40 has made assertive claims with respect to its ability to engender increased engagement, ambition, and scope of climate governance over both time and space. This chapter provides an independent corroboration of these claims, which have to-date been based on internal network data and analysis, by drawing on a novel dataset of over 10,000 climate governance actions adopted by C40 cities between 2001 and 2018. The chapter confirms that the C40 has increased the level of member city engagement, action, and ambition across geographic and economic divides. This renders the C40 distinct from other voluntary city-networks such as ICLEI and is deeply puzzling given the inability of these networks to deploy coercion or hard compliance mechanisms to close the gap between nominal commitments and concrete actions. The chapter concludes by considering three alternative explanations: as a function of economic development; as a function of inter-city learning, and as a function of the efforts of the network bureaucracy. Each is shown to be incomplete, thus demonstrating the need for a novel means of theorizing coordination in city-networks like the C40.

Whereas the C40 was fragmented in its early years, the network underwent a process of transformative change that began with the selection of Michael Bloomberg, as mayor of New York City, as C40 Chair in late 2009. As described in Chapters 1 and 3, both coordination and convergence around a common set of governance norms and a collective identity were increasingly apparent during the four-year period (2010-2014) in which New York occupied the C40 Chair. The theory of global urban governance fields is applied to explain why Bloomberg and New York were able to achieve what both the Clinton Climate Initiative and previous C40 Chairs could not. Bloomberg and New York brought with them considerable claims to material, reputational, and institutional capital, but it was the ability to link these to securing recognition for the cities of the C40 from external audiences – international financial institutions like the World Bank, multinational corporations, private capital markets – that authorized them to set the terms upon which such recognition would be granted within the governance field. In so doing the C40 began to converge toward a common set of governance norms – autonomy and global accountability – that underpin the production of coordinated action.

While voluntary city-networks lack formal mechanisms of coercion, they remain subject to complex political and power relations that shape their capacity to produce collective efforts. This chapter develops a general theory of global urban governance fields that brings to light the ways in which power is present in city-networks like the C40. The chapter starts from the premise that coordination in these networks requires convergence around a shared sense of what it means to “be” a global urban climate governor. While multiple actors – not only cities but also private corporations, philanthropic foundations, civil society organizations, and international organizations - seek to shape the content of field norms, practices, and collective identity, in newly created governance fields the authority to do so is contested. Actors make particular claims to authority, based on material resources, expertise, reputation, and institutional position, but only through the mechanism of recognition are these acknowledged as authoritative. The ability to secure recognition for the members of the governance field enables those actors to secure deference to particular terms of recognition (the governance norms, practices), shaping how governance is understood and practiced by those within the field.

Over the past decades, international institutions, such as treaties and regimes, have proliferated in global governance, and we have seen a tremendous amount of studies on their emergence, maintenance and effectiveness. Increasingly it has become evident, however, that such institutions do not operate in a void but within complex webs of larger governance settings. These large web-like structures, or ‘governance architectures’, are important to understand because they shape, enable and at times hinder the functioning of single international institutions and are crucial variables in determining the overall effectiveness of global governance. In recent years, this concept of governance architecture has effectively shifted the debate to situations in which an area is regulated by multiple institutions and norms in complex settings. This introductory chapter offers conceptual clarity about global governance architectures and their structural features as well as an overview of key insights gained through the last decade of research. We also identify key methodological approaches, challenges, and advances in this field of study.