This chapter argues that whereas much of the past century was geared towards a legal and institutional homogenisation of international drug control, the coming decades appear underpinned by recourse to ‘policy pluralism’ as a mechanism to enable policy evolution. It is precisely these endogenous processes of pluralism, devolution and increasing diversity of global drug policies that provide the most promising avenues for various actors to influence policies at local, national, regional and international levels. It further argues that the international drug control system is undergoing a long-term process of fragmentation and evolution towards what international relations scholars in other spheres would term a ‘regime complex’. It concludes by suggesting that these endogenous regime changes likely provide the greatest opportunity to draw exogenous actors and regimes into the system’s orbit and thereby modernise and adapt drug policies to new global realities.

In the resilience theories, multilevel, cross-scale and polycentric governance approaches represent a governance approach that can match ecological dynamic structures and scales, as well as a structure providing for a diversity of measures. Multilevel and polycentric governance are generally displayed in how societies are governed with dynamic levels, including nested, intertwined contacts, and cooperation among a number of actors and organizations. The legal system is by nature similar to resilience governance structures when it comes to multilevel governance. Law is developed, structured, designed, adopted, and implemented at many different scales and levels in parallel and is often governed by separate authorities or administrative organizations. Law is constituted by nested systems and measures that function in parallel at different geographical and temporal scales. However, in the perspective of matching law with resilience, this feature calls for a review of, e.g., authority, coordination, review, and the implementation in overlapping, polycentric legal systems.