ABSTRACT
This chapter outlines the institutional and political context of the Platform’s future operations and identifies the nature of the coordination challenge that IPBES faces, as well as the initial measures that it has adopted in order to meet them. Although many analysts stress the “fragmentation” of international
environmental governance, we prefer the notion of “regime complex” in order to highlight interactions among its components, which may generate a chaotic, contradictory global regulatory environment or work in a more collaborative and complementary fashion. After a brief theoretical overview and a subsequent attempt to delineate the biodiversity regime complex (hereafter referred to as “the Complex”), the chapter proceeds with a review of the role IPBES could play in bringing scientific coherence to the Complex, given that the latter already harbors several science policy interfaces. Of course, this raises the question of the complementary or competitive
relationship between these decades-old institutions and the newly created IPBES. As a latecomer established outside the perimeter of existing conventions by the UN General Assembly, the Platform is not necessarily well placed to coordinate existing science/policy interfaces, especially when taking international biodiversity politics into account. However, with its broader mandate that includes the controversial ecosystem service evaluation, IPBES could help integrate various knowledge systems, provide a wider and consolidated perspective, and therefore help tackle issues that have impeded effective policy making in the biodiversity regime complex since the early 1990s. The first section clarifies the notion of regime complex and applies it
to the biodiversity domain, in relation to other possible conceptualizations. It then proceeds by identifying some of the coordination challenges, especially from the science/policy interface angle. The second section will examine more specifically how that challenge has been met so far, and how IPBES can operate and gain legitimacy within the biodiversity regime complex through its interactions with the other components of the complex.
