Ecosystems and Ordering: Exploring the Extent and Diversity of Ecosystem Governance
This article argues that, to grasp how global ordering will be impacted by planetary-level changes, we need to systematically attend to the question of the extent to which and how ecosystems are being governed. Our inquiry builds upon—but extends beyond—the environmental governance measures that have garnered the most scholarly attention so far. The dataset departs from the current literature on regional environmental governance by taking ecosystems themselves as the unit of analysis and then exploring whether and how they are governed, rather than taking a starting point in environmental institutions and treaties. The ecosystems researched—large-scale marine, freshwater, and terrestrial ecosystems—have been previously identified by a globe-spanning, natural science inquiry. Our findings highlight the uneven extent of ecosystem governance—both the general geographic extent and certain “types” of ecosystems seemingly lending themselves more easily to ecosystem-based cooperation. Furthermore, our data highlight that there is a wider range of governance practices anchored in ecosystems than the typical focus on environmental institutions reveals. Of particular significance is the tendency by political actors to establish multi-issue governance anchored in the ecosystems themselves and covering several different policy fields. We argue that, in light of scholarship on ecosystem-anchored cooperation and given the substantive set of cases of such cooperation identified in the dataset, these forms of ecosystem-anchored cooperation may have particularly significant ordering effects. They merit attention in the international relations scholarship that seeks to account for the diversity of global ordering practices.
Government allocates NOK 45 million to Geopolitics Research Centre led by NUPI
Stein Oluf Kristiansen
Stein Kristiansen is a professor at the School of Business and Law at University of Agder (UiA). He works part-time with NUPI’s group on climate a...
Matthew Blackburn
Matthew Blackburn is a Senior Researcher in NUPI's Research Group on Russia, Asia and International Trade. He is also an affiliated researcher at...
Asia-Arctic Diplomacy a Decade Later: What has changed?
Ten years ago, five Asian states – China, India, Japan, Singapore, and South Korea – joined the Arctic Council as observers. This article discusses how the Asia-Arctic Five’s policies policies and priorities have evolved over the past decade and what their hopes are for the incoming Norwegian chairmanship of the Council.
Tobias Etzold
Tobias Etzold (PhD) is a Senior Research Fellow in the Research Group for Security and Defense at NUPI. He mainly works as project leader of the C...
The EU Navigating Multilateral Cooperation (NAVIGATOR)
How should the EU navigate the increasingly complex - and conflict-laden - institutional spaces of global governance to advance a rules-based international order? And what factors should be emphasized...
The localisation of aid - debate and challenges
The localisation agenda resurfaced with the Covid 19-pandemic among development and humanitarian actors. Aid localisation refers to providing aid through local, grassroots institutions without the use of intermediaries, which involves a shift in power over policy and financial issue to local actors.
The International Monetary Fund and the World Bank: from institutional anchors of liberalism to geopolitical rivalry
The IMF and the World Bank are not only amongst the world's most powerful international institutions, but they also represent the most visible institutional anchors of the liberal post-Second World War order. This may be about to change because the IMF and the World Bank are economic institutions and, thereby, bound to reflect global economic realities. And, from an economic perspective, these realities have for quite some time indicated a world that increasingly moves in a multipolar direction. The turn to economic multipolarity has followed in the wake of increased Great Power rivalry between the United States and China. This chapter charts out these developments and how they have affected and IMF and the World Bank, and what consequences this may have for these institutions and the type of global leaderships that they seek to set.
Navigating ASEAN-Myanmar Relations: The Phnom Penh Summit as a Critical Juncture for (Dis)Engagement
This article considers recent internal developments in Myanmar and how they strain external relations with the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN). It identifies ASEAN’s Phnom Penh Summit as a critical juncture for disengaging the military government, engaging non-political entities and upgrading the 2021 Five-Point Consensus.