Beyond the formal intergovernmental organization: studying the complexity of global governance

Marie Vandendriessche, Jacint Jordana and Axel Marx

Chapter 5 in Institutions of Global Governance, 2025, pp 86-106 from Edward Elgar Publishing

Abstract: Global governance today encompasses a tangle of institutions of different compositions and types. While nation-states and the formal intergovernmental organizations they create remain important actors in global governance, other institutional forms, including private transnational regulatory organizations, public–private partnerships, and informal intergovernmental organizations, are proliferating and contributing to increasing institutional complexity. Over the past two decades, a significant scholarly effort has developed to better conceptualize the shape and drivers of this complexity and understand its implications. This chapter focuses on the frameworks and models that can be used to study the global governance of specific issue areas, including regime complexes, global governance complexes, hybrid institutional complexes, global governance architectures, and supercluster complexes. The chapter starts by clarifying the available frameworks, their defining features, and key debates. This discussion includes reflections on the main dimensions that can be used to classify and analyze complexes of institutions governing an issue area, and some of the insights that have been gained through research. A final section focuses on one of the main defining features of global governance through complexes of institutions – their propensity to continuously evolve – by examining drivers and processes of evolution, as well as the results of these developments.

Keywords: Global governance; Institutional complexity; Institutional diversity; Regime complex; Global governance evolution (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025
ISBN: 9781035302574
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