The global institutional arrangements that structure contemporary relations between states and other actors have grown beyond past benchmarks of diversity. This institutional diversity accentuates some challenges for contemporary global governance, including how states and global actors strike a balance in the integration of institutions. While in some periods and areas there have been successful efforts to integrate global governance arrangements, a sense has long prevailed among contemporary policy-makers and scholars that global governance has become conspicuously fragmented. Institutional incompatibilities that stem from diverse designs are one reason why the world is thought to be poorly equipped to effectively manage global challenges in the security, trade, finance, health, environmental, and other policy domains, especially when these intersect. This chapter probes the contributions of comparative institutional analysis for explaining past and present institutional diversity as well as answers to why institutional integration remains an elusive goal in contemporary global governance.

This chapter examines the making of a new sphere for clean energy governance, and takes an intertemporal perspective to identify three distinct stages in its politics. The first stage occurred through transnational network-based initiatives in the 1990s and early 2000s. The second period marked a shift in interest and consensus among powerful actors, resulting in the creation of a new international hierarchy dedicated to renewable energy by the end of 2010. The third stage marked the articulation of norms through the Clean Energy for All framework and the adoption of the Sustainable Development Goal 7 on Affordable and Clean Energy. These policy moves demarcated and institutionalized a new, layered, and evolving sphere of governance of networks, hierarchies, and hybrid arrangements. The analysis illuminates how networks linking different governance modalities capture the growing interdependence across issue areas and actors. It also provides evidence of tendencies of hybridization and layering of modes of governances, as networks often engage markets, rely on state agencies for resources, and create pathways to new intergovernmental or hybrid structures. The analysis shows that the pluralization of agency has shaped the networks and market-based mechanisms that gave rise to the sphere of clean energy governance.

Chapter 4 focuses on the variety of governors in areas of limited statehood. State and non-state, local, national, transnational, as well as international actors are motivated to engage in governance in areas of limited statehood if certain conditions are present. Moreover, we find the entire range of modes of governance, from hierarchical steering including the use of force to inclusive, participatory, and deliberative governance. We start with external state governance, including international and regional organizations, development agencies, and foreign governments. We then turn to the non-state sector, starting with (I)NGOs and multi-stakeholder partnerships. A very different type of actor are (multinational) companies who are usually not inclined to become governors to begin with. In contrast, “traditional” authorities, such as tribal chiefs and community leaders as well as non-state justice institutions tend to be among the most important indigenous governors in many areas of limited statehood. A rather unlikely group of governors are violent non-state actors such as rebel groups or warlords.