Young 1996

Institutional Linkages in International Society: Polar Perspectives
Author(s): Oran R. Young

Source: Global Governance, Vol. 2, No. 1 (Jan.–Apr. 1996), pp. 1-23
Published by: Lynne Rienner Publishers
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/27800125
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Global Governance 2 (1996), 1-24
Institutional Linkages
in International Society:
Polar Perspectives
os?
_ ?_
Or an R. Young
The last decade has witnessed an extraordinary surge of interest in

international regimes or, more broadly, international institutions
construed as sets of roles, rules, and relationships that define so
cial practices and guide the behavior of participants at the international
level.1 Most contributions to this rapidly growing field of study treat
regimes as self-contained or stand-alone arrangements that can be ana
lyzed in isolation from one another. As a means of grasping the essential
nature of international institutions as well as enhancing analytic tractabil
ity in ongoing efforts to understand these complex phenomena, this strat
egy undoubtedly has much to be said for it.2 But recent studies of interna
tional regimes and especially efforts to identify factors that determine the
effectiveness of these arrangements3 have made it clear that this approach
has serious limitations when it comes to the pursuit of knowledge about
the success of institutional arrangements or, in other words, their ability to
direct or redirect the behavior of those actors whose activities give rise to
collective-action problems in international society.
In the typical case, issue-specific regimes exhibit complex linkages to
other institutional arrangements, and the resultant institutional interactions
have significant consequences for the outcomes flowing from the opera
tion of each of the affected regimes. What is more, institutional linkages
are destined to loom larger in the future as interdependencies among func
tionally distinct activities rise in international society and the density of in
ternational regimes increases. Just as we have learned to acknowledge the
importance of thinking systematically about issue linkages in our efforts to
comprehend the dynamics of collective action at the international level,4
we must now add a sustained effort to understand institutional linkages in
order to take additional steps toward broadening and deepening our knowl
edge of international institutions. Today, most thoughtful observers of in
ternational institutions would acknowledge the significance of this chal
lenge. But how can we move beyond this simple acknowledgment to begin
to make progress toward understanding the nature and consequences of
institutional linkages at the international level?
2 Institutional Linkages in International Society
In this article 1 take some initial steps toward answering this question.
The first substantive section proposes a set of analytic distinctions among
types of institutional linkages as a means of sorting out a number of dif
ferent phenomena that come into focus under this rubric. The next section
turns to the dynamics of institutional linkages in the sense of probing the
forces likely to give rise to the several types of linkages identified in the
preceding section. The final substantive section adopts a strategic per
spective and looks to the calculations of policymakers faced with opportu
nities to use institutional linkages instrumentally or the necessity of react
ing to such linkages resulting from the actions of others. This account
relies on a number of plausible premises regarding the consequences of in
stitutional linkages; a sustained treatment of the consequences will have to
await another occasion. But if I am right about the significance of link
ages, this topic should soon become a prominent item on the agenda of
regime analysis.
At this early stage, the analysis centers exclusively on classic regimes
or, in other words, interstate arrangements articulated in explicit (although
not necessarily legally binding) agreements. Wherever possible, I draw on
experience with institutional arrangements operating in the polar regions?
the Arctic and the Antarctic?to illustrate the distinctions and the argu
ments presented. Nonetheless, the issues under consideration in this study
of institutional linkages are generic, and the ideas set forth in the follow
ing sections are intended to constitute a first cut at understanding a phe
nomenon that arises throughout international society.
Types of Institutional Linkages
All institutional linkages involve politically significant connections be

tween or among institutional arrangements that are differentiable in the
sense that they have distinct creation stories and ongoing lives of their own.
But not all linkages are alike. This section draws distinctions among four
types of linkages that give rise to what I shall call embedded institutions,
nested institutions, clustered institutions, and overlapping institutions. I
hasten to add that these distinctions are analytic in character and therefore
not intended to describe phenomena that are mutually exclusive in real
world situations. Also, I do not claim that they constitute an exhaustive ty
pology; others may discern additional types of linkages among international
institutions that are worthy of consideration. Yet the distinctions I lay out
do point to a number of differentiable phenomena and, in the process, pro
vide a basis for taking some initial steps toward understanding the nature
and significance of institutional linkages in international society.
For the most part, issue-specific regimes in international society are
deeply embedded in overarching institutional arrangements in the sense
Or an R. Young 3
that they assume?ordinarily without saying so explicitly?the operation

of a whole suite of broader principles and practices that constitute the deep
structure of international society as a whole.5 The regime for Svalbard ar
ticulated in the 1920 Treaty of Spitzbergen, the 1973 Agreement on Con
servation of Polar Bears, the various components of the Antarctic Treaty
System (ATS), and the newly emerging environmental protection regime
for the Arctic, for example, are all predicated on an understanding of in
ternational society as a society of states possessing exclusive authority
over their own domestic affairs, enjoying sovereign equality in their deal
ings with one another, and refusing to be bound by rules of the game to
which they have not consented explicitly. This goes a long way toward ex
plaining why such regimes are rarely open for nonstate actors to become
members in any formal sense, are normally articulated in explicit?al
though not necessarily legally binding?agreements, are not considered
binding on states that have not acceded to them, and are rarely endowed
with dependable sources of revenue subject to their own control.
However, although we often take them for granted, the broader princi
ples and practices of international society are not immutable. Those who
speak of the decline of the nation-state and the rise of global civil society,
for instance, have gathered evidence to suggest that international society is
even now showing signs of evolving into a new form of social order or, per
haps, into some form of dualism in which the society of states coexists with
a global civil society based on alternative premises.6 The presence of a sta
ble social order is hardly sufficient to ensure that regimes dealing with spe
cific Arctic or Antarctic issues will arise, much less prove effective once
they are in place. The record of recent efforts to come to terms with matters
like the issues of mining in Antarctica7 and the form of pollution known as
Arctic haze?a type of long-range transboundary air pollution?in the Far
North8 offers clear evidence of the problems that can arise in such a setting.
Yet there is much to be said for the proposition that the presence of a viable
social order is necessary for the establishment of effective regimes dealing
with complex problems, like the management of multiple-use conflicts in
large marine ecosystems (e.g., the Bering Sea), or even more specific prob
lems, like the management of high seas fishing in a geographically limited
area (e.g., the Jan Mayen-Iceland capelin fishery). In fact, it seems unlikely
that issue-specific arrangements dealing with such matters could succeed in
guiding behavior in a broader institutional environment characterized by un
certainty or open disagreement about the identity or character of regime
members, much less the deep structure of relationships among them.9
Institutional nesting, by contrast, is a matter of linkages in which spe
cific arrangements restricted in terms of functional scope, geographical
domain, or some other relevant criterion are folded into broader institu
tional frameworks that deal with the same general issue area but that are
less detailed in terms of their application to specific problems. In effect,
the nested components bring the premises of a broader regime?rather

than the constitutive principles or rules of international society as a whole
?to bear oh specific topics. Perhaps the most familiar examples today
arise in connection with the nesting of substantive protocols into arrange
ments set forth in framework conventions (e.g., the integration of the sul
fur dioxide, nitrogen oxide, and volatile organic compounds protocols into
the framework established by the 1979 Convention on Long-Range Trans
boundary Air Pollution, or lrtap).
Institutional nesting occurs with some frequency in the polar regions.
A striking case in point involves the bilateral Norwegian-Russian regime
governing fishing in the Barents Sea, on the one hand, and the evolving
law of the sea, on the other.10 It is no accident that the Norwegian-Russian
regime came into being in conjunction with the emergence of the broader
arrangements developed during the 1970s and articulated formally in the
1982 United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (unclos). It is
doubtful, for example, if these Arctic partners could have succeeded in ex
cluding third-party operators from the lucrative commercial fisheries of
the Barents Sea in the absence of the opportunity to nest their bilateral ar
rangement into the provisions of the new law of the sea pertaining to fish
ery conservation zones and exclusive economic zones (EEZs), codified in
Part 5 of the 1982 convention but already a de facto reality by the late
1970s. What is more, both the declining emphasis in the overall law of the
sea on precise principles for delimiting the maritime boundaries of adja
cent states and the growing emphasis on the value of regional cooperation
among users of living resources located in well-defined marine ecosys
tems?see especially unclos Article 63?undoubtedly served to strengthen
the hand of those who advocated the establishment of a bilateral Norwegian
Russian regime for the fisheries of the Barents Sea.
Similar cases of institutional nesting in the polar regions arise in con
nection with the ice-covered areas provision of unclos Article 234 and the
special-areas provision of the 1973/1978 International Convention for the
Prevention of Pollution from Ships, or marpol, dealing with a number of
categories of vessel-source pollution. Given the tension between Canada
and the United States over the legal status of the Northwest Passage, not to
mention Soviet-U.S. frictions engendered by the Cold War, the authority
granted to Arctic states under the terms of Article 234 to promulgate spe
cial regulatory arrangements to protect ice-covered areas produced little
institutional development in the years immediately following the conclu
sion of the 1982 law of the sea convention.11 Today, however, the emer
gence of new opportunities for cooperation arising in the wake of the Cold
War and the growth of interest in transforming the Northern Sea Route
running along the coast of the Eurasian Arctic into an international com
mercial waterway12 have produced a serious interest in the idea of devel
oping a regime for ice-covered areas to be nested into unclos. In the south
Oran R. Young 5
polar region, Antarctica has been recognized since 1992 as a marpol spe
cial area, a designation that makes it possible to nest special restrictions
regarding vessel-source pollution in this region into the general provisions
of the marine pollution regime. Although no similar action has been taken
so far in the north polar region, a number of actors have suggested using
the marpol special-areas provision as a means of regulating environmen
tal impacts arising from the development of offshore oil and gas reserves
located both in the North American Arctic (e.g., the Beaufort Sea) and in
the Eurasian Arctic (e.g., the Barents Sea).13
For its part, institutional clustering occurs when those engaged in the
formation or operation of differentiable governance systems find it attrac
tive to combine several of these arrangements into institutional packages,
even when there is no compelling functional need to nest the individual
components into a common and more generic framework. The system of
arrangements included in the 1982 convention on the law of the sea, with
its functionally differentiated provisions for navigation, fishing, deep
seabed mining, marine pollution, scientific research, and so forth, consti
tutes a classic case in point. What holds these elements together and makes
it meaningful to treat them collectively as the law of the sea is a common
concern for issues relating to marine areas rather than the presence of an
overarching institutional framework into which the individual components
are nested.14 Much the same can be said about proposals for the develop
ment of a law of the atmosphere, which have surfaced from time to time?
so far with little effect?in connection with the development of specific
regimes for transboundary air pollution, ozone depletion, and climate
change.15
A consideration of recent developments in the polar regions suggests
that there are several possible rationales for creating clustered regimes.
Joining together analytically differentiable issues, such as fishing, offshore
hydrocarbon development, navigation, and pollution control in the Bering
Sea, may prove attractive as a means of achieving success in institutional
bargaining. In effect, the prospect of being able to work out package deals
covering several distinct issues can facilitate efforts to devise constitu
tional contracts that offer net benefits to all the participants.16 In other
cases, institutional clustering may seem attractive as a means of achieving
economies of scale in the operation of regimes once they are in place.
Some such reasoning appears to play a role in the thinking of at least some
supporters of the Canadian Initiative to create an Arctic council whose
coverage would extend to a wide range of functional concerns arising in
the Arctic. Beyond this, clustered regimes will appeal to those seeking to
foster consciousness raising and ultimately the emergence of a shared vi
sion of a given region or cluster of issues as a politically potent construct.
Reasoning of this sort appears to have played a part in the thinking of
those who developed and promoted the idea of the Barents Euro-Arctic
Region (bear) during 1992-1993.17 A significant effect of clustering in

this case was to propagate the image of a natural or politically appealing
grouping of actors and issues where none had previously existed.18
Setting aside the categories of embedded, nested, and clustered
regimes, it is increasingly apparent that we need to add overlapping
regimes as a separate category of linkages in which individual regimes that
were formed for different purposes and largely without reference to one
another intersect on a de facto basis, producing substantial impacts on each
other in the process. Well known to those responsible for creating and op
erating institutional arrangements in domestic social settings, these insti
tutional intersections?often unforeseen and unintended by the creators of
individual regimes?are fast becoming an object of attention among stu
dents of international institutions.19 The burgeoning literature on intersec
tions between trade and environmental arrangements is perhaps the most
prominent expression of this trend.20 But a consideration of recent devel
opments affecting large marine ecosystems in the polar regions, like the
Bering Sea or the Barents Sea, also suggests that institutional overlaps will
become progressively more important as determinants of the effectiveness
of functionally restricted regimes as the density of human activities ex
tending beyond the jurisdictional reach of individual states continues to
grow during the foreseeable future.
To take a specific example, consider the complications now arising as
Russia and the United States (and to a lesser extent Canada, Japan, Korea,
and Poland) seek to develop separate arrangements dealing with commer
cial fishing, the protection of marine mammals, offshore hydrocarbon de
velopment, transit passage, pollution control, the creation of protected nat
ural areas, and the activities of indigenous peoples in the Bering Sea
region.21 Again and again, those pursuing goals defined in terms of one or
another of these functional areas are finding it difficult to achieve success
without taking into account the development of rules relating to one or
more of the other functional areas. This is one reason why many of the an
alytic tools developed in the 1950s and 1960s to manage individual fish
eries are now being discarded or drastically restructured.22 In the specific
case of the Bering Sea, there is a growing prospect that efforts to create
regimes dealing with these linked issues on a piecemeal basis will give
way to a meaningful commitment to devise a clustered regime for the area
treated as a large marine ecosystem.23
Similar observations are in order regarding the growing concern for
harmonizing the various components of the Antarctic Treaty System (ATS).
Much of the rising interest in the creation of a systemwide organization to
operate or manage this regime is attributable to concerns of this sort. But
such institutional mergers are often hard to effectuate due to the increasing
number of distinct and sometimes conflicting interests that must be accom
modated as the functional scope or geographic domain of a regime expands.
Oran R. Young 7
Experience with comparable issues at the domestic level, moreover, sug

gests that initiatives designed to broaden institutional arrangements to
cope with overlaps often result in regimes that harbor internal inconsis
tencies or even outright contradictions.
Following a lead suggested by the literature on externalities, it is
worth pausing here to observe that institutional overlaps may have posi
tive as well as negative implications?or some combination of the two?
for the effectiveness of international institutions. Clearly, overlapping in
stitutions may involve incompatible arrangements posing problems for
those seeking to achieve the goals of any one of the affected regimes.
Witness the problems that arise in trying to sort out the overlapping pro
visions of the functionally delimited international regime covering whales
and whaling and the geographically delimited arrangements for the Ant
arctic Ocean articulated in the 1980 Convention on the Conservation of
Antarctic Marine Living Resources (ccamlr). Yet institutional intersec
tions can lead to the development of unusually effective international
regimes by stimulating efforts to think in whole-ecosystems terms and to
devise integrated management practices. A striking case in point is the
initiative spearheaded by Norway to create cooperative arrangements for
the Barents Euro-Arctic Region treated as an integrated system and codi
fied in a ministerial declaration signed at Kirkenes in January 1993.24 An
other is the emerging interest in developing a comprehensive regime for
the Bering Sea region.
Related distinctions involve the degree to which institutional overlaps
are unidirectional or reciprocal and symmetrical or asymmetrical. Whereas
the flow of impacts is largely unidirectional in some cases (e.g., the impact
of the global ozone regime on the various elements of the Antarctic Treaty
System), there are many cases in which institutional impacts are reciprocal
in nature (e.g., the mutual impacts of ccamlr and the whaling regime).
Among other things, this consideration is likely to have important conse
quences for the politics of overlapping regimes. Where impacts are not
only reciprocal but also roughly symmetrical in nature, there will normally
be greater incentives to work toward mutual adjustment and possibly the
creation of clustered regimes than in cases that are highly asymmetrical in
these terms. Needless to say, an understanding of these matters may prove
helpful to clever participants in the processes of institutional bargaining
that give rise to specific regimes in the first place.
The Dynamics of Institutional Linkages
How can we explain or account for patterns of institutional linkages that

emerge among individual regimes in international society? To what extent
are linkages products of conscious efforts on the part of individual actors
to pursue their own interests as opposed to de facto consequences of in

teractive behavior? This is obviously a large topic that calls for extensive
analysis on the part of those interested in institutional arrangements oper
ative in a variety of issue areas. Yet it is possible to initiate a dialogue on
this subject on the basis of current observations. In the following para
graphs, I draw on the distinctions among types of linkages articulated in
the preceding section to launch an enquiry into the dynamics of institu
tional linkages in international society.
There is a sense in which embeddedness is a fact of life, from the
point of view of those seeking to create issue-specific regimes. In effect,
these links reflect and represent the deep structure of international soci
ety. Most people engaged in processes of regime formation therefore take
it for granted that the general rules governing activities in this social set
ting will apply to any specific institutional arrangements they may create;
it is hard to get those who have been thoroughly socialized into this way
of pursuing their goals to think otherwise. The negotiators who produced
the 1973 Agreement on Conservation of Polar Bears, for example, had no
hesitancy about treating this effort as a matter of creating a regime among
the five range states (Canada, Denmark-Greenland, Norway, Russia, and
the United States), each of which would have full authority over the im
plementation of the agreement's provisions within its own jurisdiction.
They deliberately finessed a number of broader jurisdictional issues relat
ing to the conservation of polar bears to avoid having to deal with prob
lems that would be hard to resolve within the framework established by
the general rules of international society. For their part, even those who
pushed hard to scuttle the Antarctic minerals convention and to seize the
resultant opportunity to negotiate what became the 1991 Protocol to the
Antarctic Treaty on Environmental Protection?a set of actors including
influential environmental advocacy groups with no great interest in per
petuating the dominance of the nation-state?consented to the creation of
an institutional arrangement that is entirely compatible with the basic rules
of international society.
Yet this is by no means the whole story with regard to the dynamics
of embedded institutions. Because it is difficult to reform, much less to
revolutionize, the institutional substructure of international society through
direct actions, those desiring to change the basic rules of this social system
frequently concentrate on the establishment of issue-specific regimes in
the hope that they can start trends that will spread from one issue area to
another and eventually lead to perceptible changes in the deep structure of
the system as a whole. Important pressure points in this connection involve
matters such as the roles to be played by nonstate actors in international
regimes, the decision rules governing efforts to arrive at social choices re
garding the issues covered by institutional arrangements, and the sources
of funding available to finance the activities of those responsible for ad
ministering individual regimes.
Oran R. Young 9
Here, again, recent polar experience offers interesting examples. The

creation and development of the Arctic Environmental Protection Strategy
(aeps), a regionwide action plan adopted in a 1991 ministerial declaration
signed in Rovaniemi, Finland, has become a vehicle for indigenous peo
ples to push their claims to representation at the international level beyond
participation as members of national delegations.25 The organizational ar
rangements emerging in connection with the Barents Euro-Arctic Region
include not only a Barents Euro-Arctic council composed of representa
tives of the nation-states involved but also a regional council comprising
representatives of the eight counties or subnational units of government
that make up the region; indigenous peoples constitute a ninth consti
tuency represented in the regional council.26 For its part, the arrangement
set forth in the failed 1988 Convention for the Regulation of Antarctic
Mineral Resource Activities (cramra) would have provided for decisions
to be made by a two-thirds majority vote in the regulatory committees?
the management mechanism for individual mining sites?and for funds to
be raised through a system of levies on companies operating under the aus
pices of the regime.27
Interesting as these polar cases are, they also suggest how difficult it
is in practice to change entrenched features of international society. What
ever the fate of the Barents Euro-Arctic Region, it is clear that one of the
major snags that held up progress for some years on the Canadian Initia
tive to establish the Arctic Council encompassing the Arctic Eight (that is,
Canada, Denmark-Greenland, Finland, Iceland, Norway, Russia, Sweden,
and the United States) was the opposition of several governments to the
vision of those who initially called for a council featuring a multilevel sys
tem of representation that would allow the voices of indigenous peoples,
environmental groups, and subnational units of government, among others,
to be heard.28 Representatives of the foreign ministries of several of the
Arctic states have found it difficult even to grasp the meaning of early
Canadian ideas regarding the composition of the Arctic Council. As far as
cramra is concerned, the institutional innovations incorporated in this
convention disappeared for all practical purposes with the political col
lapse of the proposed minerals regime as a whole. Whatever its merits in
other respects, the Environment Protocol that came into being in the wake
of cramra's demise is considerably less innovative in institutional terms
than the minerals regime would have been. Those who pushed for the
adoption of the protocol obviously opted, at the end of the day, for the
substantive provisions of this arrangement over the institutional innova
tions of the minerals convention.
Turning now to nested regimes, a number of additional observations
about the dynamics of institutional linkages come into focus. Above all, it
is apparent that there are several distinct motives that may lead the creators
of specific arrangements to nest them into broader institutional frameworks.
One obvious motive is to avoid raising larger and more fundamental issues
by placing new, functionally specific regimes into familiar categories rep

resented by existing regulative structures. This process is well illustrated
by the care with which new arrangements for marine living resources and
environmental protection have been tied into the overarching Antarctic
Treaty System as a means of deflecting the efforts of a number of devel
oping states?led by Malaysia?to move the consideration of Antarctic is
sues into the forum of the UN in contrast to the arena of the Antarctic
Treaty Consultative Meetings, or atcms.29 A striking feature of this case is
the extent to which those involved in the ATS have proven willing to set
aside their own conflicts (for example, clashes between environmental
groups and national Antarctic science programs) in order to present a
united front against the challenge of the developing states, a challenge en
ergized in considerable part by a desire to share in any economic benefits
that might flow from the exploitation of Antarctic resources treated as the
common heritage of humankind.
Those engaged in regime formation may also find nesting appealing as
a means of legitimizing issue-specific arrangements or of simply making it
easier for affected parties to accept new initiatives by incorporating them
into existing arrangements whose implementation in domestic arenas has
become a routine matter for the participants. Important as this motive for
nesting undoubtedly is in some situations, it is notable that regime-build
ing efforts in the polar regions have often proven resistant to this type of
linkage. Unlike the Scientific Committee on Antarctic Research (scar),
for example, the International Arctic Science Committee (iasc) has fea
tures (e.g., a regional board composed of individuals expected to represent
the interests of the governments of the Arctic Eight) that make it difficult
to incorporate this arrangement into the International Council of Scientific
Unions (icsu) family.30 Those who have taken the lead in efforts to make
progress toward managing the Bering Sea region and even the whole Arc
tic Ocean as large marine ecosystems have generally resisted the idea of
nesting such arrangements into the regional seas component of the UN En
vironmental Programme (unep).31 So far, the idea of creating special areas
for various parts of the Arctic under marpol has not borne fruit. But these
cases should not allow us to lose sight of other situations in which the le
gitimizing role of nesting has proven or will prove attractive in the polar
regions. As the preceding section suggests, nesting the Norwegian-Russian
regime for the fisheries of the Barents Sea into the broader structure of the
emerging law of the sea became a means of legitimizing the phasing out of
third-party fishers. Similarly, there is every reason to expect that those
now striving to come to terms with nuclear contamination in Arctic wa
ters will see much to be gained from nesting any agreements they reach
regarding this problem into the overarching structure provided by the 1973
London Dumping Convention.
Oran R. Young 11
In other cases, nesting is simply an artifact of the limits of the process

of institutional bargaining involved in the creation of international
regimes.32 Those endeavoring to create regimes often find themselves
faced with a choice between holding out for preferred substantive provi
sions that may prove elusive or settling for mutually acceptable framework
agreements in the hope that the launching of a regime will trigger a dy
namic of its own that serves to increase the probability that more substan
tive provisions will follow. When such hopes are realized, it is perfectly
natural to nest ensuing substantive provisions into the framework arrange
ment established in the first phase of the process of regime formation. A
striking and familiar case in point that has major implications for the polar
regions is the ozone regime in which the nesting of the Montreal Protocol
of 1987?followed by the London Amendments of 1990 and the Copen
hagen Amendments of 1992?into the relatively weak framework provi
sions of the 1985 Vienna Convention for the Protection of the Ozone
Layer has produced an arrangement that shows every sign of succeeding in
phasing out the production and consumption of chlorofluorocarbons
(CFCs) and a number of related chemicals thought to be harmful to strato
spheric ozone.33 Another interesting case involves the effort to build an
environmental protection regime for the Arctic under the terms of the Arc
tic Environmental Protection Strategy. This effort owes a lot to experience
with the long-range transboundary air pollution regime in Europe in which
the establishment of an effective monitoring system?known as emep?
catalyzed movement toward the adoption of a succession of substantive
protocols dealing with specific pollutants.34 The aeps combines a rela
tively weak framework arrangement with the initiation of several pro
grammatic efforts like the Arctic Monitoring and Assessment Program
(amap); it will be a matter of considerable interest to follow this case to
see whether the parties are able to nest a series of substantive provisions
into the aeps framework over the next few years.
As to clustered regimes, it is not surprising that interest has emerged
in such arrangements in the context of institutional bargaining. As we
know from domestic experience, in fact, the dynamics of bargaining tend
to favor clustering even in cases where the linkages are largely matters of
political convenience. Yet an examination of polar cases also suggests that
individual participants may well discover strong incentives to oppose clus
tering, either to avoid pressures to compromise on priority issues or to
minimize the chances of getting drawn into regional arrangements that
could produce negative consequences for their interests in other regions
or in international society as a whole. Some such interpretation may help
to explain the reluctance of the United States to join in creating the aeps
and the initial lack of U.S. enthusiasm for the Canadian Initiative to es
tablish the Arctic Council.35 Regarding itself as a superpower with global
interests, the United States is sensitive to developments (e.g., the growth

of a strong, multidimensional Arctic regional regime) that could lead oth
ers to conclude that the United States is shifting its attention away from
other regions of the world (e.g., the Middle East or East Asia) or from is
sues that are global in character (e.g., human rights, climate change).
It is worth noting also that it is apt to prove increasingly difficult to
aggregate institutional bits and pieces into clustered regimes after the fact.
Once distinct arrangements are established, they take on lives of their own.
This is partly a reflection of the norms and principles or the cognitive vi
sions on which regimes are founded. It is not easy, for example, to marry
regimes established to deal with a few species over a broad geographic
range (e.g., the whaling regime) with regimes covering broader functional
concerns over a narrower range (e.g., the emerging Bering Sea regime).
Partly, it is a consequence of the fact that individual regimes acquire ad
ministrative arrangements of their own and loyal supporters who have per
sonal stakes in the survival of regimes as they know them. The result is a
kind of institutional inertia that can effectively preclude efforts to create
clustered regimes through mergers of existing arrangements, even when
the case for doing so on functional grounds is persuasive. Therefore, al
though it is important to avoid clustering for purely tactical reasons during
the course of institutional bargaining, it is equally important to recognize
that successful clustering normally requires decisive action at the outset.
In some respects, overlapping regimes present a distinctive picture re
garding the dynamics of linkages. Whereas nesting and clustering are al
most always products of conscious choices, institutional intersections typ
ically take the form of unintended by-products of separate initiatives
undertaken by different groups of actors pursuing their own objectives
with little concern for possible institutional linkages. This is a common
occurrence, for example, in situations featuring the coexistence of regimes
that are functionally narrow but geographically broad and regimes that
cover a number of functions within a more restricted geographic area. The
intersection between the worldwide arrangement for whales and whaling
and the regime dealing with marine living resources in the waters adjacent
to Antarctica exemplifies this type of situation. In other cases, overlaps
arise from uncoordinated efforts to deal with a number of problems that
are functionally distinct but that pertain to the same geographic area. In
dependent efforts to solve problems involving high seas fishing, offshore
oil and gas development, pollution prevention, and protected natural areas
in the Bering Sea region, for example, are bound to intersect with each
other at numerous points.36 Not surprisingly, this has become a prominent
argument advanced by advocates of the creation of a comprehensive inter
national regime to manage human activities affecting the Bering Sea re
gion treated as a large marine ecosystem.
However, it is worth noting that there are some cases in which insti
tutional overlaps are products of deliberate actions. Some impacts are
Oran R. Young 13
consequences of efforts on the part of disaffected parties to solve problems

associated with the operation of existing regimes by creating new institu
tions that they believe will foster reform in existing regimes or, alterna
tively, produce more favorable results under new auspices. A striking case
in point is the recent establishment of the North Atlantic Marine Mammals
Commission (nammco), an arrangement established by Iceland and Nor
way together with the residents of the Faeroe Islands and Greenland to
manage consumptive uses of marine mammals, including whales, in the
North Atlantic area in the wake of the refusal of the International Whal
ing Commission to sanction the resumption of whaling on the part of any
one other than aboriginal subsistence whalers.37
There are, as well, cases in which institutional intersections have more
positive origins. Those involved in building new regimes, for example,
may deliberately encourage the growth of intersections with existing in
stitutions in order to promote the proposition that there are economies of
scale to be realized from establishing a single set of organizations to ad
minister the provisions of two or more distinct regimes. While common
practice in domestic settings?especially with regard to organizational ar
rangements designed to deal with matters of authoritative interpretation,
compliance, and dispute resolution?this mode of operation is just begin
ning to achieve prominence at the international level. But if, as most ob
servers expect, the demand for complex institutional arrangements contin
ues to grow in international society, intersections arising from processes of
this sort will become increasingly common.
Implications for Policy and Policymakers
How can policymakers who recognize the growing importance of institu

tional linkages use their knowledge to make progress toward achieving
their own ends in designing international regimes? Conversely, what can
those who are responsible for managing specific regimes learn from the
analysis of institutional linkages that will maximize the probability that
these institutional arrangements will prove effective in achieving their
stated (or unstated) goals? Drawing on the preceding analysis, I turn in this
final section to a preliminary exploration of these strategic questions to
show how the study of institutional linkages can illuminate matters of im
mediate interest to the policy community. In the process, I suggest that
these linkages are often subject to conscious manipulation on the part of
actors seeking to promote their own ends.
Attitudes toward institutional embeddedness typically break down
along ideological lines. Conservatives?in the sense of those deeply com
mitted to the status quo regarding the defining features of international so
ciety?generally regard embeddedness as a good thing. Basing issue-spe
cific regimes squarely on the fundamental principles of international
society not only serves to reaffirm these basic precepts but also minimizes
the likelihood that issue-specific regimes will get out of hand, precipitat
ing institutional changes capable of triggering a dynamic that ultimately
undermines important tenets of international society as a whole (e.g., the
rule restricting membership to states). The act of embedding regimes, on
this account, constitutes a barrier against piecemeal developments leading
to broader, more systemic changes.
Contrast this with two other perspectives on embeddedness. Tech
nocrats?those who focus on the success of individual regimes on their
own terms while remaining neutral regarding the character of international
society as a whole?approach the issue of embeddedness in a purely in
strumental fashion. They will embrace embeddedness when it seems use
ful as a means of promoting the effectiveness of the regimes they care
about; otherwise they will deemphasize or even ignore it. Negotiators rep
resenting the twelve signatories to the 1959 Antarctic Treaty, for exam
ple, devised a set of provisions generally supportive of the basic tenets of
international society, while at the same time ignoring or setting aside some
of the usual rules pertaining to jurisdiction in order to craft the crucial
compromise?embodied in Article 4?needed to alleviate the problem of
overlapping jurisdictional claims as a barrier to mutually beneficial coop
eration in the region.38 A similar instrumental perspective appears to un
derlie current efforts to provide larger and more autonomous roles for non
state actors in emerging Arctic arrangements, such as the aeps and the
bear, without calling into question the proposition that international soci
ety is fundamentally a society of states.
For their part, those desiring to use the creation of issue-specific
regimes as a vehicle for promoting larger changes in international society
must engage in a continuous balancing act with regard to embeddedness.39
Pushing too hard runs the risk of blighting the prospects for success with
respect to the regime at hand as well as provoking a backlash on the part
of defenders of the faith with regard to the central tenets of international
society. Undue caution, on the other hand, runs the risk of failing to take
advantage of opportunities to use specific regimes as vehicles for reform
ing international society. Choices concerning the proper balance between
these risks will normally vary both as a function of the modus operandi of
different actors and strategic or contextual factors. It is no accident, for ex
ample, that Greenpeace has adopted a more radical posture than the World
Conservation Union (formerly the International Union for the Conserva
tion of Nature and Natural Resources) in seeking to use Antarctica as a
vehicle for promoting larger agendas of nonstate actors or that indigenous
peoples organizations (e.g., the Inuit Circumpolar Conference) have been
particularly active in treating the newly emerging Arctic regimes as op
portunities to attack the underlying norm limiting membership in interna
tional regimes to states. With regard to context, it is interesting to observe
Oran R. Young 15
that the Antarctic and Southern Ocean Coalition accepted an environmen

tal regime for Antarctica that is relatively conventional in terms of its ori
entation toward the basic tenets of international society. In effect, the 1991
Environment Protocol represented such a dramatic improvement over
cramra in substantive terms that the environmental advocacy groups were
willing to embrace it without quibbling over its embeddedness in the ex
isting structure of international society.
What can we say about the policy relevance of nesting? In recent
years, the virtues of nesting?largely in the form of the framework con
vention/protocol model of regime formation?have achieved the status of
conventional wisdom due primarily to the relative success of lrtap and
the ozone regime.40 The fact that efforts to create regimes to deal with cli
mate change and the loss of biological diversity have followed the same
path reinforces this conclusion. A desire to avoid the problems plaguing
efforts to form a comprehensive law of the sea has undoubtedly reinforced
this trend. The impact of this development is clearly apparent in the polar
regions, not only in the obvious effort to follow the example of lrtap in
the development of the aeps but also and especially in the tendency to
reconceptualize the Antarctic Treaty System, which antedates the current
interest in the framework convention/protocol model, as an arrangement
resembling the nested structure of lrtap and the ozone regime.
Still, it is far from clear that this model, with its central focus on nest
ing of a particular type, makes sense as the preferred approach to the full
range of international issues.41 To facilitate thinking about this issue, con
sider the differences between what we may call regulative regimes, man
agerial regimes, and programmatic regimes. Regulative regimes feature
sets of behavioral rules or prescriptions that each of the members agrees to
implement and comply with within the bounds of its own jurisdiction. The
polar bear regime is an arrangement of this type. To a large extent, the
marpol rules relating to vessel-source pollution also exhibit this pattern.
Managerial regimes are arrangements featuring the establishment of pro
cedures designed to allow the members to make collective decisions in a
regular and orderly fashion. The provisions of the Icelandic-Norwegian
regime for the area around Jan Mayen, which establishes procedures for
setting annual quotas for the harvest of fish and for making decisions
about the development of hydrocarbons, exemplify this sort of arrange
ment. So also does the whaling regime with its procedures for making an
nual decisions about quotas and periodic decisions about the establishment
of whale sanctuaries and the like. For their part, programmatic regimes
feature the initiation of collectively supported activities designed to stim
ulate learning regarding relevant problems as well as options for solving
them. The aeps, like lrtap on which it is modeled, illustrates this type of
arrangement. Of course, these are analytic distinctions: actual regimes can
and often do include features belonging to two or even all three of these
types. But these distinctions are useful for a number of purposes, includ
ing thinking through the virtues of nested regimes.
The advantages of nesting are indisputable in the case of evolving pro
grammatic regimes. The point of such arrangements is to set in motion ac
tivities that are intended to lead to a broadening and deepening of the
regimes in question. This is the genius of lrtap, in which the operation of
em hp and related programmatic mechanisms have led to "tote-board diplo
macy"42 involving the negotiation of a series of protocols dealing with
specific types of airborne pollutants. There are some signs that a similar
dynamic may emerge from the activities of the Arctic Monitoring and As
sessment Programme, the Working Group on the Conservation of Arctic
Flora and Fauna, and the recently formed Task Force on Sustainable De
velopment and Utilization in the case of the aeps.43 But the success of
such evolutionary processes is hardly automatic with regard to specific
regimes. Efforts to nest new elements into the regime for the Mediter
ranean Basin established initially under the 1976 Barcelona Convention
have proved disappointing to many, a situation that eventuated in the rene
gof; non of the convention itself in 1995. Similarly, the addition of the
199 Environment Protocol may turn out to be a unique event in the evo
lution of the Antarctic Treaty System rather than an indication that this ar
rangement is now taking on the character of a programmatic regime.
The argument for nesting is far less persuasive, on the other hand, in
the cases of regulative regimes and managerial regimes. Some regimes are
based on sets of rules that are essentially complete and self-contained in
their original form. This is probably a fair characterization of the regime
for the conservation of North Pacific fur seals, which lasted through much
of this century,44 and of the regime for the Svalbard Archipelago, which
was established in the i920s and remains effective today.45 In other cases,
the initial set of rules may grow as a result of experience with a social
practice but in a manner that does not involve nesting of the sort under
consideration here. The recommendations or agreed measures adopted
over the years by the biennial Antarctic Treaty Consultative Meetings, for
instance, are properly construed as prescriptions?albeit ones that do not
require formal ratification on the part of members?that, taken together,
have broadened and deepened this social practice. But it does not seem ap
propriate to describe these new elements as being nested into the original
arrangement in the sense that the 1987 Montreal Protocol and the London
Amendments are nested into the ozone regime or the 1994 sulfur protocol
is nested into lrtap.
As to managerial regimes, the situation is even more straightforward.
Once established, procedures for making collective choices can be used
over and over again. This is obviously true with regard to decisions in
volving the same subject, such as setting annual quotas for specific fish
eries, establishing annual harvest levels for individual species of whales,
Oran R. Young 17
or listing individual species under the appendixes of the regime governing

trade in endangered species. In many cases, established procedures for
making collective choices are also extendible to new subjects without any
need to restructure the procedures themselves. This certainly seems to be
true of the atcms of the Antarctic regime and of the sessions of the Con
ference of the Parties (COP) operating under the terms of the ozone
regime. Of course, this does not rule out the possibility of nesting in con
nection with managerial regimes. New issues may require the establish
ment of specialized procedures for arriving at collective choices. The
failed regime for mineral activities in Antarctica, for example, included
several different decision systems to cover separate types of issues. If it
had survived, this regime might well have acquired additional decision
systems over the course of time. But nesting is much less central under
these conditions than it is in the case of programmatic regimes.
As suggested in the previous section, the negative experience with
clustering in connection with the law of the sea, especially when juxta
posed to the positive experience with nesting in the cases of lrtap and
ozone, has given clustering a bad reputation in recent years. Yet it seems
premature to generalize from these experiences to the conclusion that clus
tering in the development of institutions is a strategy to be avoided, either
in the polar regions or in international society more generally. As the
Mediterranean case suggests, nesting may turn out to have severe limits,
even in connection with the development of relatively simple program
matic regimes. Nor is there any basis for assuming that more complex
problems, like climate change, will yield to a strategy that has worked well
in simpler cases, like lrtap or ozone.46 Under the circumstances, it is im
portant to avoid being swept away by current fashions and to retain the op
tion of clustering as one of a set of tools available for use in dealing with
a range of collective action problems at the international level.
In regional settings, like the Arctic today, clustering seems likely to
hold particularly strong attractions for those desiring to foster new per
spectives on regions (e.g., the Arctic treated as a single region) or subre
gions (e.g., the bear). Approaching problems on an issue-by-issue basis
may prove successful in functional terms, but it is unlikely to give rise to
new images or shared visions regarding larger trends in international so
ciety. This is why many actors?in both domestic and international are
nas?correctly perceived the proposal for establishing the bear as a re
aligning initiative to be supported or opposed on grounds extending well
beyond the specific provisions set forth in the 1993 ministerial declaration
itself. The same is true on an even larger scale of proposals to create an
encompassing, treaty-based Arctic regime similar in character to the
Antarctic Treaty System in its current form or even a more modest Arctic
Council that could become a vehicle for the promotion of a clustered
regime for the circumpolar north as a whole. Contrast these cases with the
process of creating the aeps construed as an arrangement limited to envi

ronmental issues, and even then only to a circumscribed set of environ
mental concerns. Under the circumstances, it would be a mistake to try to
understand debates regarding the pros and cons of clustered regimes as
narrow functional issues to be resolved on technical grounds. Implicitly at
least, far more than that is at stake in efforts to establish clustered regimes
covering a wide range of functional matters in a well-defined region like
the Arctic.
If anything, the policy implications of the account of overlapping in
stitutions in the preceding sections of this article are even more far-reach
ing than those of the other types of institutional linkages. There are many
cases in which intersections have reached?or will soon reach?the point
where they not only demand a new outlook on the creation and operation of
regimes but also call for the development of new bodies of knowledge to
underpin these departures. Consider the case of managing fisheries in large
marine systems, like the Barents Sea and the Bering Sea, as cases in point.
The traditional models resting on calculations of maximum sustainable
yields (MSY) from individual stocks have clearly broken down as bases for
setting total allowable catches (TACs) on an annual basis and dealing with
a suite of related issues.47 Some have sought to replace these outmoded
constructs with management models emphasizing interactions among mul
tiple species.48 But this approach is almost certain to prove stillborn due to
its failure to include a wide range of intersecting issues (e.g., offshore hy
drocarbon development, vessel-source pollution, runoffs from land-based
activities, ecotourism) that have come into focus in recent years.
One response to this development is to embrace the idea of large ma
rine ecosystems (LMEs).49 But this move raises a new set of issues. As
those who think in terms of marine biological diversity have pointed out,
most analyses of LMEs are subject to criticism both because they make ar
bitrary assumptions about the delimitation of marine ecosystems and be
cause they retain the assumption that maximizing the consumptive use of
renewable resources is the primary criterion for making policy choices
about the management of marine ecosystems.50 What conservation biology
has taught us is that inappropriate delimitations of management units can
have disastrous consequences in terms of efforts to maintain biological di
versity from the genetic level to the landscape level. What is more, we
now find ourselves facing increasingly difficult questions regarding the
goals of ecosystems management. How should we think about tradeoffs
between the harvesting of fish and the production of hydrocarbons in an
area like the Barents Sea? How should we incorporate the claims of sub
sistence harvesters in contrast to commercial harvesters in managing the
fisheries of the eastern Bering Sea? How should we weigh the claims of
ecotourists desiring to experience a completely pristine Antarctic wilderness
against the needs of scientists to build landing strips for aircraft or to deal
Oran R. Young 19
with the inevitable flow of wastes arising from their presence? None of
these questions has a straightforward answer, much less one that is correct.
Assuming that we can develop the knowledge base needed to under
stand institutional intersections, how can we design regimes to cope with
them? There are at least three?not necessarily mutually exclusive?re
sponses to this question. For purposes of discussion, it may help to call
them side agreements, mergers, and procedural devices. Side agreements
involve efforts on the part of those concerned with a specific regime to add
provisions designed to mitigate its unintended?ordinarily negative?im
pacts on other institutional arrangements. Perhaps the best-known recent
case involves the side agreements on environmental issues negotiated in
connection with the North American Free Trade Agreement (nafta).
When overlaps start to affect core interests, however, it seems unlikely
that the negotiation of side agreements will be sufficient to solve the re
sultant problems. In such cases, it may be necessary to merge the regimes
in question, creating a single more comprehensive regime covering two or
more intersecting issue areas. A number of observers have proposed some
thing of this sort for the Bering Sea region in the sense of a single regime
dealing with fish, marine mammals, oil and gas, pollution control, trans
portation, protected natural areas, and indigenous rights in an integrated
manner. Some have begun to talk in similar terms about a comprehensive
regime for the entire circumpolar north.
Attractive as this approach may be in some areas, it is easy to see that
integrated regimes covering numerous issue areas can become so complex
that it is difficult to reach agreement on their terms, much less to admin
ister or operate them successfully once established. Under the circum
stances, a third approach featuring the establishment of procedural arrange
ments designed to resolve conflicts arising from institutional overlaps
becomes attractive. Of course, this is exactly what happens in most do
mestic settings where conflicts of laws are everyday occurrences and both
traditional judicial procedures and administrative law procedures loom
large as mechanisms for sorting out day-to-day problems arising from in
stitutional overlaps. A notable feature of this approach is that the relevant
procedures often rest on some authority that is independent of the laws or
institutional arrangements they are called upon to interpret. This is part of
what is meant by those who speak of an "independent judiciary." Is it pos
sible to imagine a similar development in international society giving rise
to an independent mechanism authorized to resolve conflicts among the
provisions of overlapping regimes in contrast to disputes about the provi
sions of individual regimes? Today, this will seem to many an improbable
development at the international level. But if, as I suggest, the significance
of institutional intersections grows rapidly in the near future, interest in
devising effective means for coming to terms with the resultant conflicts is
sure to rise.
Conclusion
Whatever the attractions of examining individual regimes as self-contained

entities, there can be no doubt that the subject of institutional linkages in
the sense of connections among differentiable social practices is destined
to loom larger and larger in our thinking about governance in international
society during the foreseeable future. Partly, this is a consequence of the
growing density of issue-specific regimes in this social setting, a develop
ment that makes it increasingly likely that individual regimes will impinge
on each other in significant ways. In part, it is a result of rising interde
pendences among the members of international society, a more general
trend that makes it harder and harder to disentangle regimes created for
different purposes. In this article, I have sought to initiate a dialogue re
garding several distinct types of institutional linkages under the headings
of embedded institutions, nested institutions, clustered institutions, and
overlapping institutions. If I am right in my assessment of the growing im
portance of institutional linkages in international society, these preliminary
observations should prove sufficient to trigger an increasingly sophisti
cated stream of work on both the causes and the consequences of such
linkages along with their implications for policymakers during the next
stage in the development of regime analysis. ?
Notes
Oran R. Young directs both the Dickey Center Institute of Artie Studies and the In
stitute of International Environmental Governance at Dartmouth College. He is one
of the principal investigators of the project on International Environmental Com
mitments at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (iiasa) in Vi
enna. A long time student of international institutions, his most recent book is In
ternational Governance: Protecting the Environment in a Stateless Society.
1. Oran R. Young, International Governance: Protecting the Environment in
a Stateless Society (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1994).
2. Stephen D. Krasner, ed., International Regimes (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell Uni
versity Press, 1983); Volker Rittberger, ed., Regime Theory and International Re
lations (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993).
3. Oran R. Young, "The Effectiveness of International Institutions: Hard
Cases and Critical Variables," in James N. Rosenau and Ernst-Otto Czempiel, eds.,
Governance Without Government: Order and Change in World Politics (Cam
bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), pp. 160-194; Peter M. Haas, Robert O.
Keohane, and Marc A. Levy, eds., Institutions for the Earth: Sources of Effective
International Environmental Protection (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1993); Marc A.
Levy, Oran R. Young, and Michael Z?rn, "The Study of International Regimes,"
European Journal of International Relations, (September 1995): 267-330.
4. James K. Sebenius, "Negotiation Arithmetic: Adding and Subtracting Is
sues and Parties," International Organization 37 (Spring 1983): 281-316.
Oran R. Young 21
5. John Gerard Ruggie, 'international Regimes, Transactions, and Change:

Embedded Liberalism in the Postwar Economic Order," in Stephen D. Krasner, In
ternational Regimes, pp. 195-231; Ruggie, "Embedded Liberalism Revisited: In
stitutions and Progress in International Economic Relations," in Emanuel Adler
and Beverly Crawford, eds., Progress in Postwar International Relations (New
York: Columbia University Press, 1991), pp. 201-234.
6. James N. Rosenau, Turbulence in World Politics: A Theory of Change and
Continuity (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990); Ronnie D. Lipschutz,
"Restructuring World Politics: The Emergence of Global Civic Society," Millen
nium 21 (Winter 1992): 389-420; Paul Wapner, Environmental Activism and
World Civic Politics (Albany: suny Press, 1995).
7. Arnfinn Jorgensen-Dahl and Willy Ostreng, eds., The Antarctic Treaty
System in World Politics (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1991).
8. Marvin S. Soroos, "Arctic Haze and Transboundary Air Pollution: Con
ditions Governing Success and Failure," in Oran R. Young and Gail Osherenko,
eds., Polar Politics: Creating International Environmental Regimes (Ithaca, N.Y.:
Cornell University Press, 1993), pp. 186-222.
9. Timothy Dunne, "International Society: Theoretical Promises Fulfilled?"
Cooperation and Conflict 20 (1995): 125-154.
10. Olav Schr?m Stokke and Alf Hakon Hoel, "Splitting the Gains: Political
Economy of the Barents Sea Fishery," Cooperation and Conflict 29 (1991): 49-65;
Olav Schram Stokke, Lee G. Anderson, and Natalia S. Mirovitskaya, "The Effec
tiveness of International Regimes: The Barents Sea Fisheries Case," case study pre
pared for the Dartmouth project on the effectiveness of international regimes, 1994,
available from the Dickey Center Institute of Arctic Studies at Dartmouth College.
11. Franklyn Griffiths, ed., Politics of the Northwest Passage (Kingston and
Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 1987).
12. Willy Ostreng, "The Northern Sea Route and the Barents Region," in Olav
Schram Stokke and Ola Tunander, eds., The Barents Region: Cooperation in Arc
tic Europe (London: Sage, 1994), pp. 159-172.
13. James M. Broadus and Raphael V. Vartanov, eds., The Oceans and Envi
ronmental Security: Shared U.S. and Russian Perspectives (Washington, D.C.: Is
land Press, 1994), chap. 6.
14. Robert L. Friedheim, Negotiating the New Ocean Regime (Columbia: Uni
versity of South Carolina Press, 1993). This feature of the unclos package has also
made it feasible to split off the regime for deep seabed mining for restructuring
without jeopardizing the viability of the other elements in the package. See also
"Law of the Sea Forum: The 1994 Agreement on Implementation of the Seabed
Provisions of the Convention on the Law of the Sea," American Journal of Inter
national Law 88 (1994): 687-714.
15. For a helpful comparison of marine and atmospheric issues see James K.
Sebenius, "The Law of the Sea Conference: Lessons for Negotiations to Control
Global Warming," in Gunnar Sjosted, ed., International Environmental Negotia
tion (Newbury Park, Cal.: Sage, 1993), pp. 189-216.
16. Sebenius, "Negotiation Arithmetic."
17. Sverre Jervell, "A Report from Europe's Northern Periphery," in Mare
Kukk, Sverre Jervell, and Pertti Joenniemi, eds., The Baltic Sea Area: A Region in
the Making (Oslo: Europa-programmet, 1992), pp. 13-25.
18. Olav Schram Stokke and Ola Tunander, eds., The Barents Region: Coop
eration in Arctic Europe (London: Sage, 1994); Jan Ake Dellenbrant and Mats-Olov
Olsson, eds., The Barents Region: Security and Economic Development in the Eu
ropean North (Umea, Sweden: Umea University Press, 1994).
19. Richard Herr and Edmund Chia, "The Concept of Regime Overlap: To
ward Identification and Assessment," manuscript, University of Tasmania, 1995,
20. Steve Charnovitz, "gatt and the Environment: Examining the Issues," In
ternational Environmental Affairs 4 (Summer 1992): 203-233; Konrad von
Moltke, "The Maastricht Treaty and the Winnipeg Principles on Trade and Sus
tainable Development," pamphlet published by the International Institute for Sus
tainable Development, Winnipeg, 1995.
21. Oran R. Young, Resource Management at the International Level (Lon
don: Pinter, 1977); David A. Shakespeare, "Recent U.S.-U.S.S.R. Agreements Re
lating to the Bering Sea Region," Arctic Research of the United States 5 (Fall
1991): 37-47; Richard Townsend, ed., Proceedings of the Conference on Shared
Living Resources of the Bering Sea Region (Washington, D.C.: Council on Envi
ronmental Quality, 1991); Natalia S. Mirovitskaya and J. Christopher Haney,
"Fisheries Exploitation as a Threat to Environmental Security: The North Pacific
Ocean," Marine Policy (July 1992): 243-258; William T. Burke, "Fishing in the
Bering Sea Donut: Straddling Stocks and the New International Law of Fisheries,"
Ecology Law Quarterly 16 (1989): 285-310; Broadus and Vartanov, The Oceans
and Environmental Security.
22. P. A. Larkin, "An Epitaph for the Concept of Maximum Sustainable
Yield," Transactions of the American Fisheries Society 106 (1977): 1-11.
23. Kenneth Sherman, "Large Marine Ecosystems," in Encyclopedia of Earth
System Science 2 (New York: Academic Press, 1992), pp. 653-673.
24. Stokke and Tunander, The Barents Region.
25. Monica Tennberg, "The Rovaniemi Process and New International Ac
tors," manuscript, 1993.
26. Jervell, "A Report from Europe's Northern Periphery."
27. Jorgensen-Dahl and Ostreng, The Antarctic Treaty System in World
Politics.
28. Arctic Council Panel, To Establish an International Arctic Council: A
Framework Report (Ottawa: Canadian Arctic Resources Committee, 1991).
29. D. Edmar, "The Antarctic Treaty System and the United Nations," in R.
A. Herr, H. R. Hall, and M. G. Howard, eds., Antarctica's Future: Continuity or
Change? (Hobart: Tasmanian Government Printing Office, 1990), pp. 189-192;
Peter Beck, "The United Nations and Antarctica: Still Searching for the Elusive
Convergence of View," Polar Record 29 (October 1993): 313-320.
30. E. F. Roots, "Co-operation in Arctic Science: Background and Require
ments," in Franklyn Griffiths, ed., Arctic Alternatives: Civility or Militarism in the
Circumpolar North (Toronto: Science for Peace/Samuel Stevens, 1992), pp.
136-155. At this writing, iasc is exploring the idea of seeking associate member
ship in icsu in contrast to scar's status as a scientific committee of icsu.
31. Erik Franckx, Maritime Claims in the Arctic: Canadian and Russian Per
spectives (Dordrecht, Netherlands: Martinus Nijhoff, 1993).
32. Young, International Governance, chap. 4, 5.
33. Edward A. Parson, "Protecting the Ozone Layer," in Haas, Keohane, and
Levy, Institutions for the Earth, pp. 27-73.
34. Marc A. Levy, "European Acid Rain: The Power of Tote-Board Diplo
macy," in Haas, Keohane, and Levy, Institutions for the Earth, pp. 73-132.
35. Oran R. Young, Arctic Politics: Conflict and Cooperation in the Circum
polar North (Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 1992).
36. Young, Resource Management at the International Level.
37. Alf Hakon Hoel, "Regionalization of International Whale Management:
The Case of the North Atlantic Marine Mammals Commission," Arctic 46 (June
Oran R. Young 23
1993): 116-123; David D. Caron, "The International Whaling Commission and the
North Atlantic Marine Mammal Commission: The Institutional Risks of Coercion
in Consensual Structures/' American Journal of International Law 89 (1995):
154-174.
38. H. Robert Hall, "International Regime Formation and Leadership: The
Origins of the Antarctic Treaty" (Ph.D. diss., University of Tasmania, 1994).
39. Paul Wapner, "Politics Beyond the State: Environmental Activism and
World Civic Politics, World Politics 47 (1995): 311-340.
40. Lawrence Susskind, Environmental Diplomacy: Negotiating More Effec
tive Global Agreements (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994).
4L James K. Sebenius, "Designing Negotiations Toward a New Regime: The
Case of Global Warming," International Security 15 (Spring 1991): 110-148.
42. Levy, "European Acid Rain."
43. For evidence of the evolution of the Arctic Environmental Protection
Strategy, see the WWF Arctic Bulletin, a publication of the WWF Arctic
Programme.
44. Natalia S. Mirovitskaya, Margaret Clark, and Ronald G. Purver, "North
Pacific Fur Seals: Regime Formation as a Means of Resolving Conflict," in Young
and Osherenko, Polar Politics, pp. 22-55.
45. Elen Singh and Artemy Saguirian, "The Svalbard Archipelago: The Role
of Surrogate Negotiators," in Young and Osherenko, Polar Politics, pp. 56-95.
46. David G. Victor and Julian E. Salt, "From Rio to Berlin: Managing Cli
mate Change," Environment 36 (December 1994): 6-15, 25-32; D. G. Victor and
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Institutional Linkages in International Society: Polar Perspectives

Author(s): Oran R. Young

The last decade has witnessed an extraordinary surge of interest in

Types of Institutional Linkages

All institutional linkages involve politically significant connections be

that they assume?ordinarily without saying so explicitly?the operation

the nested components bring the premises of a broader regime?rather

Region (bear) during 1992-1993.17 A significant effect of clustering in

Experience with comparable issues at the domestic level, moreover, sug

The Dynamics of Institutional Linkages

How can we explain or account for patterns of institutional linkages that

to pursue their own interests as opposed to de facto consequences of in

Here, again, recent polar experience offers interesting examples. The

by placing new, functionally specific regimes into familiar categories rep

In other cases, nesting is simply an artifact of the limits of the process

interests, the United States is sensitive to developments (e.g., the growth

consequences of efforts on the part of disaffected parties to solve problems

Implications for Policy and Policymakers

How can policymakers who recognize the growing importance of institu

that the Antarctic and Southern Ocean Coalition accepted an environmen

or listing individual species under the appendixes of the regime governing

process of creating the aeps construed as an arrangement limited to envi

Whatever the attractions of examining individual regimes as self-contained

5. John Gerard Ruggie, 'international Regimes, Transactions, and Change:

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