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14 - Taking Stock and Moving Forward

from Part IV - Future Directions

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  17 April 2020

By
Frank Biermann ,
Rakhyun E. Kim ,
Kenneth W. Abbott ,
James Hollway ,
Ronald B. Mitchell  and
Michelle Scobie
Edited by
Frank Biermann  and
Rakhyun E. Kim
Frank Biermann
Affiliation:
Universiteit Utrecht, The Netherlands
Rakhyun E. Kim
Affiliation:
Universiteit Utrecht, The Netherlands
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Summary

There is a growing consensus in the literature that governance architectures matter. However, we lack sufficient knowledge about their emergence, dynamics and impacts. This concluding chapter summarizes all insights in the book Architectures of Earth System Governance, and emphasizes how this book has made a scientific contribution by enhancing conceptual clarity, synthesizing a decade of intense research, and charting directions for future research. The book has made at least one point clear: the ‘architecture lens’ offers a bird’s-eye view on the global governance landscape that is highly valuable in explaining outcomes of world politics. The architectures matter in how institutions interact with others, how institutions are entangled with others in larger regime complexes and how institutions are affected by broader architectures that are more or less fragmented or polycentric. In this concluding chapter, we also illustrate how such key insights gained could inform a set of transformative policy proposals regarding the architecture of earth system governance.

Keywords

Governance architectureinstitutional complexityevolutionary dynamicsstructural transformationpolicy reform
Type
Chapter
Information
Architectures of Earth System Governance
Institutional Complexity and Structural Transformation
 , pp. 299 - 321
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2020

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