Seeking to contribute to the governance stream of this year’s Berlin
Conference, the paper addresses an emerging phenomenon of global environmental
governance: the increasing overlap and interplay among institutions that touch
upon related subject matters. Presenting one of the first outcomes of the
Earth System Governance project, the paper focuses on one specific case of
institutional interplay, namely the overlap between the United Nations climate
regime and the World Trade Organization (WTO). While parties of the UN climate
regime discuss trade-related measures for a post-2012 agreement, WTO parties
debate climate-related trade measures. This duplication of debates entails a
lack of legal clarity, which may have detrimental implications for the further
negotiation and implementation of both regimes. Drawing on neoliberal
institutionalism and cognitivism, we identify two reasons for these interplay
effects: the constellation of preferences and the lack of consensual knowledge
on overlapping issues. Based on a workshop organized jointly with the UN
Environment Programme, we developed suggestions to tackle these reasons.
Policies could accommodate the lack of knowledge by means of flexible
approaches, e.g. default values for border cost adjustments and ‘living lists’
of sustainability criteria for lifting trade barriers. With regard to the
constellation of country preferences, a careful linkage of debates across
arenas can produce additional trade-offs and break some of the deadlocks in
which these discussions have ended up. On the other hand, the paper attends to
the caveats and limits of such linkages