Conceptualising how actors approach multilateral negotiations inside a regime complex

Earsom, Joseph [UCL] Delreux, Tom [UCL]

Regime complexes have come to characterize the international governance of a variety of domains. With so much overlap between the different constitutive fora of a complex, both in terms of membership and issue area, action in one forum can affect an outcome in another. Such a dynamic presents a significant opportunity for actors to strategically act across the different fora of the regime complex, such as the European Union in the international regime complex on climate change. However, despite empirical hints that actors like the EU are keen to do so, the literature has thus far not considered how such activity would manifest itself in terms of a multilateral negotiations. With regime complexes increasingly present on the international stage, understanding how actors exploit them (or not) in the context of multilateral negotiations is an essential part of the study of international governance. This paper therefore fills this gap by bridging the literature on regime complexity and multilateral negotiations. It conceptualises how an actor might connect activity across different fora of the regime complex in order to achieve a preferred outcome in multilateral negotiations. Specifically, it develops particular connections that an actor might use across fora. In doing so, it identifies four potential influential factors for such connections: negotiation stages, cost of connections for actors, functional overlap amongst fora, and the organizational structure of a given forum. The paper thus serves as a conceptual starting point for empirical research on actor behaviour in the negotiations within regime complexes.