Climate change: Transnational legal order or disorder?

Today, a huge array of institutions involving many different actors and geographic scales address the climate change problem. One study identified more than sixty transnational organizations that play some type of governance function (Bulkeley et al. 2012), and this is just the tip of the iceberg. Another author estimates that there are “hundreds (if not thousands) of institutions at global, national and local levels that seek to address various facets of the climate change problem” (Green 2013: 1). The result is a polycentric and “highly complex institutional environment” (Abbott 2012: 571). How can we make sense of this proliferation of climate change institutions? Writers have proposed several approaches. Robert Keohane and David Victor (2011) focus on the international level, suggesting that the regulatory activities of different international institutions represent a “regime complex.” Kenneth Abbott (2012) proposes understanding the even broader array of governance activities on multiple scales, by private as well as public actors, in terms of a “transnational regime complex,” comprised of governmental actors, civil society organizations, and business, which form what he and Duncan Snidal call a “governance triangle” (Abbott & Snidal 2009). Others have analyzed climate change activities in terms of multi-scalar or multilevel governance (Osofsky 2007; Kern & Bulkeley 2009; Peel et al. 2012), transnational governance (Pattberg & Stripple 2008; Andonova et al. 2009), polycentricity (Ostrom 2009; 2010), or fragmentation (Carlarne 2008; van Asselt et al. 2008; Boyd 2010; Young 2011).