What Makes a 'Regime Complex' Complex? It Depends
Author | : James Hollway |
Publisher | : |
Total Pages | : 0 |
Release | : 2020 |
ISBN-10 | : OCLC:1375398525 |
ISBN-13 | : |
Rating | : 4/5 (25 Downloads) |
Book excerpt: What makes the collections of international institutions or regimes governing various domains--called in the literature regime, institutional or governance complexes--“complex”? This article examines several conditions for complexity discussed in that literature, and finds them necessary but not sufficient. It argues that the sufficient condition is dependence, and outlines a framework of increasing levels of synchronic (social/spatial) and diachronic (temporal) dependence. Putting dependence at the centre of discussions on regime complexes has four advantages: (1) it is analytically more precise a condition than proliferation or linkage; (2) it orients us toward questions of degree, 'how complex', instead of the binary 'whether complex'; (3) it informs a range of research design and theoretical choices, especially highlighting extra-dyadic dependencies and an underdeveloped temporal dimension; and (4) it arguably reconciles competing uses of the term 'complex' in the literature without conflating it with complexity, structure, or topology.