Fragmentation of Global Governance Architectures: The Case of Climate Policy.

Most research on global governance has focused either on theoretical accounts of the overall phenomenon, or on empirical studies of distinct institutions that serve to solve particular governance challenges. In this paper we focus instead on the overall "governance architecture," which we define as the overarching system of public and private institutions, principles, norms, regulations, decision-making procedures and organizations that are valid or active in a given issue area of world politics. Within this larger context, we analyze one aspect that is turning into a major source of concern for observers and policy-makers alike: the increasing "fragmentation" of governance architectures in important policy domains. Increasing fragmentation is prevalent in particular in the current gov¬ernance of climate change, which we have hence chosen as empirical illus¬tration for our discussion. The paper offers a first typology of different degrees of fragmentation, which we describe as integrative, cooperative and conflictive fragmentation. Based on this, we assess major scholarly literatures relevant in this debate—namely cooperation theory, environmental policy theory, and international law—and argue that all literatures offer conflicting statements regarding the relative advantages and disadvantages of fragmentation. While we conclude that on balance, fragmentation of global governance architectures brings more harm than positive effects, and that it can generally be seen as a major burden on the overall performance of the system, we also argue that different types of fragmentation have different degrees of performance, and that "integrative fragmentation" might be a realistic second-best option in a world of diversity and difference in which purely universal governance architectures are more a theoretical postulate than a real-life possibility. In the final section, we outline a number of political and institutional strategies to deal with fragmentation of governance architectures. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]