Regime complexes and national policy coherence: Experiences in the biodiversity cluster

Regime complexes or overlapping regimes relating to a common subject matter create policy coherence challenges at the national level. Recent research has observed a positive correlation between regime complexes and policy coherence: improved regime integration enables greater policy coherence and vice versa. Policy coherence has nonetheless been approached as a problem of foreign policy and not yet as a problem of public policy. This article examines the coevolution of regime complexes and (public) policy coherence in the context of international biodiversity governance, with a focus on the cluster of biodiversity-related conventions and their implementation in countries of Latin America and the Caribbean. It shows that global synergies in the biodiversity cluster have advanced more rapidly than national coordination of implementation activities. Feedback loops between governance levels have not been strong enough to bridge that gap. The article concludes that more symmetrical evolutions require deliberate cross-level management.

Velazquez Gomar JO; Stringer LC; Paavola J (2014), Global Governance, 20, pp.119-145.