Navigating Institutional Complexity: New Actors and Institutions in Densely Populated Global Governance Spaces

The concept of regime complexity provides a useful lens through which to analyze the density of global governance institutions. A growing literature identifies clusters of overlapping institutions in many policy domains of world politics, including trade, intellectual property, crisis management / peace operations, and climate change. Yet, much of the regime complexity literature focuses on states and formal intergovernmental institutions as main actors and institutional forms. Non-state actors and informal and transnational institutional arrangements have remained under-explored. This neglect is at odds with the more general global governance literature, which emphasizes the importance of these new actors and institutional forms for understanding world politics. To address this gap, we develop a theoretically informed typology that accommodates these actors and institutional types in accounting for the politics within regime complexes. This typology enables researchers to systematically map the diverse actors and institutions within regime complexes and begin to characterize complexes based on variation in actors and institutions. We also develop theoretical expectations about the conditions under which we observe what kind of regime complex, which strategies actors choose in what complexes, and with what consequences for the empowerment of different actors and institutions. The paper illustrates these effects drawing on three important regime complexes: internet governance, climate change, and global health. By offering this framework, we aim to expand regime complex theory and align it more closely with the broader global governance literature to improve on cumulation across these two important fields of inquiry.