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The risk of interacting planetary boundaries highlights the challenge for contemporary institutional structures. This article shines light on the need to better understand how regime complexes manage overlaps. In developing this understanding, the article explores overlaps and coordination in the forest regime complex. By examining the work of an informal high level agency, the Collaborative Partnership on Forests, the article investigates how coordination in a dense regime complex could be achieved. In pursuing this analysis, the article draws lessons for how to manage increasingly complex problems that interacting planetary boundaries could give rise to. The article draws on the literatures of institutional interplay and institutional design in order to understand the more subtle forms of institutional decision-making. The article shows that there are many overlaps among international institutions with forest related mandate, and identifies the innovative mechanism as important in managing these linkages, although it does not take part in actual decision-making. In sum, the article''s findings suggest that carefully designed mechanisms might be one way to, if not to overcome, at least to facilitate the institutional response of governance challenges in the complex setting of planetary boundaries. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

This article critically examines the concept of 'partnership', ubiquitous in contemporary development aid discourses. It investigates whether the language of 'partnership' signifies a change in aid relations away from the stark exertion of power characteristic of the conditionality decades of the 1980s and 1990s, or, conversely, whether 'partnership' is merely the latest guise behind which power-based relations continue to operate. A conceptual framework facilitates the deconstruction of the recently established 'Partnership for Governance Reform' in Indonesia, posited as a co-operative venture between national stakeholders and the international community. Elements of partnership or of power are sought through an examination of decision-making structures and activities. Findings are of the largely rhetorical and instrumental use of 'partnership' by international actors. Although there is nominal control by Indonesian actors, decision-making bodies are constructed in a manner which ensures that the reform agenda of international agencies remains relatively unchallenged, both in terms of what is included and excluded. Contrary to the official discourse of partnership as encouraging locally formulated reform strategies, the notions of 'partnership' and 'local ownership' simultaneously disguise and legitimise the interventions of international agencies in domestic reform processes, serving to mystify power asymmetry. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]