We are pleased to announce that our paper Mapping and Measuring the Degree of Fragmentation in Global Climate Governance Architecture by Oscar Widerberg and Marija Isailovic was presented at the 2013 8th Pan-European Conference on International Relations “One International Relations or Many? Multiple Worlds, Multiple Crises” that took place from 18-21 Semptember, Warsaw, Poland. The paper was presented as part of the panel “Mapping Global Governance: How Transnational Networks and Regimes Shape Global Policies”. The full paper can be accessed here.

Abstract:
Global climate governance has changed dramatically since the adoption of the United Nation Framework Convention on Climate Change in 1992. From being a chiefly state driven process, today’s architecture of global climate governance is characterized by a patchwork of institutions, actors, norms and discourses. Governance arrangements have emerged from bottom-up processes and resulted in non-hierarchical structures where non-state actors such as NGOs, firms, and cities, and hybrid actors such as networks and partnerships take center-stage. As a result global climate governance has become complex, polycentric, or rather, fragmented, both vertically between supranational, international, national, and subnational layers of authority, and horizontally between parallel rule making arrangements.
To understand the impact of fragmentation on policy outcomes we need a framework for mapping institutions and actors active in global climate governance and their associated norms and discourses. Mapping fragmentation and exploring the impacts on policy is a growing field of interests for IR scholars. However, current attempts to map fragmentation are insufficiently integrated in terms of level and depth. Studies focus too much on either the relations between MEAs or on the transnational level. To advance the understanding of fragmentation we need to integrate levels of analysis between institutions and actors and their underlying norms and discourses.
To bridge this gap we first develop an analytical framework assessing the level of fragmentation in global governance architectures. The framework will build on Biermann et al. (2009) and lend from realist, liberal, institutional IR traditions, as well as constructivist approaches to map fragmentation in terms of institutions, actors, norms and discourses. Second, to test the framework, we apply it to the global climate regime complex. The results feed the vibrant debate on the causes, properties, and implications of fragmentation in global environmental governance.