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From climate change to disruptive technologies, policymakers constantly face new problems calling for unprecedented institutional solutions. Yet, we still poorly understand the inventive process leading to the emergence of new institutional forms. Existing theories argue that exogenous changes provide incentives and opportunities for institutional invention. However, they fail to explain how the inventive process endogenously structures their emergence. Drawing from complexity theory and Brian Arthur's work on technological inventions, we develop a structural theory recasting the process of inventing new institutions as the combination of pre-existing institutions. Building on three assumptions related to this combinatorial process, we argue that the distance between institutions shapes the emergence of new institutional forms and their regime's trajectory. Following the initial take-off in the number of institutional inventions at the creation of a regime, we expect the rate of institutional inventions over replications will slow down as nearby institutions are combined and accelerate as distant ones are combined. We illustrate these expectations by looking at three regimes: data privacy, climate governance, and investment protection. Together, they showcase how our combinatorial theory can help make sense of the emergence of unprecedented institutions and, more generally, the pace of unfolding complexity in various international regimes.

Preferential trade agreements (PTAs) increasingly include environmental provisions. While the existing literature documents these provisions’ environmental impacts, this paper sheds light on their relation with aid flows. Using an event-specification and data on bilateral Official Development Assistance (ODA) commitments for a sample of 147 developing country recipients in the period from 2002 to 2017, we find evidence that the number of environmental provisions in PTAs is positively associated with aid during negotiation phases. With high-income countries typically pre-determining the extent of environmental provisions in their upcoming PTAs, this suggests that aid serves as a side-payment for recipients to sweeten the pot and agree upon already formulated PTA content. While both aggregate ODA and its subcomponent environmental aid a priori qualify as candidates for pre-signature side-payments, we find that only the former fulfills this expectation, presumably reflecting more leeway to exploit aid fungibility.

Negotiating parties to an environmental agreement can manage uncertainty by including flexibility clauses, such as escape and withdrawal clauses. This article investigates a type of uncertainty so far overlooked by the literature: the uncertainty generated by the creation of a Conference of the Parties (COP) in a context of sharp power asymmetry. When negotiating an agreement, it is difficult for powerful states to make a credible commitment to weaker states, whereby they will not abuse their power to influence future COP decision-making. Flexibility clauses provide a solution to this credibility issue. They act as an insurance mechanism in case a powerful state hijacks the COP. Thus we expect that the creation of a collective body interacts with the degree of power asymmetry to make flexibility clauses more likely in environmental agreements. To test this argument, we draw on an original data set of several specific clauses in 2,090 environmental agreements, signed between 1945 and 2018. The results support our hypothesis and suggest that flexibility clauses are an important design feature of adaptive environmental agreements.

Pandemics and environmental degradation are both deadly global crises, which often disproportionately impact the world’s most vulnerable populations. The scale of devastation for both pandemics and environmental problems can also be immense. The political science literature often assumes that policymakers rationally design governance systems according to the underlying problem structures they aim to address. This chapter argues that the problem structures of pandemics and environmental crises are similar on several accounts. Yet their governance systems differ in significant ways. The chapter explains this incongruity by pointing to systemic perceptions biases and structural power differentials. Addressing these biases and establishing new linkages could improve the global governance of both issue areas.

The existing literature underestimates the contribution of federated entities to international environmental agreements. This research note introduces a novel dataset on the role of federated entities in 2,077 environmental agreements. We demonstrate the value of this dataset by revisiting unexamined assumptions that stem from the literature. According to conventional wisdom, (1) federated entities’ participation in environmental agreements is a recent phenomenon, (2) this phenomenon is led by federated entities in Western democracies, (3) it has accelerated as a response to the climate crisis and (4) it is driven by the same movement that favours the participation of diverse stakeholders. This research note questions these preconceived ideas and illustrates how the new dataset sheds light on the role of federated entities in environmental governance.