Connecting the dots: Conceptualising how actors approach multilateral negotiations inside a regime complex

Regime complexes have come to characterise the international governance of a variety of domains, including biodiversity, climate change, and trade. With so much overlap between the different constitutive fora of a complex, both in terms of membership and issue area, action in one forum can affect an outcome in another. Such a dynamic presents a significant opportunity for actors to strategically act across the different fora of the regime 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, despite empirical hints that actors are keen to do so, the literature has thus far not considered how such activity would manifest itself in terms of a multilateral negotiations. With regime complexes increasingly present on the international stage, understanding how actors exploit them (or not) in the context of multilateral negotiations is an essential part of the study of international governance. This paper therefore fills this gap by bridging the literature on regime complexity and multilateral negotiations. It conceptualises how an actor might connect activity across different fora of the regime complex in order to achieve a preferred outcome in multilateral negotiations. Specifically, it develops particular connections that an actor might use across fora. In doing so, it identifies three potential influential factors for such connections: negotiation stages, functional overlap amongst fora, and the organisational structure of a given forum. The paper thus serves as a conceptual starting point for empirical research on actor behaviour in the negotiations within regime complexes.