Designing institutions for governing planetary boundaries — Lessons from global forest governance

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.