Institutional fragmentation refers to the growing diversity and challenges to coordination among private and public norms, treaties, and organizations that address a given issue area of international politics.
International relations scholars increasingly address this phenomenon, framing it with alternative concepts like regime complexes or polycentricity.
A considerable part of the existing debate remains focused on whether a centralized or polycentric governance architecture is preferable.
Instead, as this special issue shows, domains of global environmental governance—like climate change, biological diversity, renewable energy, and forestry—are already fragmented.
Fariborz Zelli and Harro van Asselt's The Institutional Fragmentation of Global Environmental Governance: Causes, Consequences, and Responses addresses more pertinent questions, both theoretical and empirical, around the phenomenon of institutional fragmentation for several realms of global environmental governance: biological diversity, climate change, forestry, renewable energy, and sustainable resource use in the Arctic.
Read the full details of their paper on Mitpressjournals.org.