Regime complexes and national policy coherence: experiences in the biodiversity cluster

Regime complexes or overlapping regimes relating to a common subject matter create a problem of policy coherence at the national level. Recent research has observed a positive correlation between regime complexes and policy coherence: improved regime integration enables greater policy coherence and vice versa. Nevertheless, the co-evolution of regime complexes and policy coherence has not been fully studied analytically and empirically. This paper explores the co-evolution thesis in the context of international biodiversity governance, with a focus on the cluster of biodiversity-related conventions and their implementation in countries of Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC). It shows that global synergies in the biodiversity cluster have advanced more rapidly than the co-ordination of implementation activities in LAC countries. Vertical linkages have not been strong enough to bridge that gap. The paper concludes that more symmetrical evolutions require deliberate cross-level management