Connecting the Dots: Conceptualising How Actors Like the EU Approach Negotiations Inside a Regime Complex

The concept of regime complexity has been increasingly used to characterize the international governance of a variety of domains, including biodiversity, climate change, and trade. As regime complexes create a dynamic that surpasses the mere sum of their constitutive units, it is likely that actors can no longer approach their diplomatic activity in one forum in isolation from the rest of the complex. The literature is relatively robust in unpacking the opportunities (and challenges) for actors to manipulate the structure of the regime complex in a way that best serves their preferences, notably via selecting an existing forum or even creating a new one to pursue a specific issue. However, quid those situations in which a particular focal forum has already been established? Such is the case for the international regime complex on climate change, in which different focal fora have become hubs for negotiating specific policy relating to different aspects of climate change. These negotiating situations still present actors with the opportunity to use the regime complex to their advantage, albeit in a different dynamic. They can connect their activity across the regime complex in order to facilitate their negotiation preferences in the focal forum. Nonetheless, despite this potential and empirical hints that actors are keen to exploit it, the literature has not adressed this aspect of regime complexity. Bridging work on regime complexes and multilateral negotiations, this paper seeks to fill this lacuna in the literature. Using the international regime complex on climate change as an example, we conceptualise 1) what such connections might look like and 2) when and where actors might employ them. We conclude in discussing how the conceptualisation can provide insight into how climate leaders like the European Union approach climate diplomacy in an increasingly polycentric context.