Description
Institutional proliferation and overlap are defining features of contemporary global governance. Yet there is significant variation in the basic structure and evolutionary trajectories of global governance complexes (GGCs), including in the extent to which new institutions are either ‘nested’ within, ‘layered’ on top of, or established in parallel—or opposition—to existing ones. This paper explores how GGCs evolve over time, and how past institutional design choices influence present outcomes through temporal processes of positive reinforcement, institutional layering, and other path-dependent mechanisms which lead to different emergent systemic properties of GGCs and condition their ability to respond to crises. I examine how cooperation on nuclear non-proliferation has evolved from being centred around a strong “focal” institution—the NPT—flanked by a small number of other institutions that were tightly integrated with the NPT, to become a sprawling complex of overlapping and competing rulesets. This fragmentation of existing legal frameworks is largely a product of the institutional architecture of the GGC and hence endogenous to cooperative frameworks. I link this fragmented structure to recent failures to tackle proliferation crises. I contrast this trajectory with the GGC for cooperation on chemical weapons proliferation in which the separate institutions have remained more tightly integrated, functionally differentiated, and hierarchically ordered, resulting in greater problem-solving capacity.
